


The Right Time for Tenderness

by liadan14



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: All of these Characters Are Deeply Traumatized, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst, At the same time, Big Bang, Byers move to Chicago, College Roommates Will and Dustin, Explicit Sexual Content, Horror, Intercrural Sex, M/M, Masturbation, Mental Health Issues, Mentioned Dustin/others, Mentioned Will/others, Minor Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington, Minor Jonathan Byers/Nancy Wheeler, Minor Maxine "Max" Mayfield/Lucas Sinclair, Mutual Pining, Past Mike Wheeler/Will Byers, Rare Pair Big Bang, Rimming, Romance, Roommates, The Demogorgon personifies Will's FOMO, Two characters masturbating in the same room, Underage Drinking, Will Byers Needs a Hug, Will Byers and his Trauma, Will and Dustin are both 18+, if by that we mean in a deeply repressed romantic way, in a friend way, simultaneous masturbation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:02:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27403945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liadan14/pseuds/liadan14
Summary: Will stares down at his hands, spread on his bare knees. His fingers are weird-shaped, knobbly at the knuckles. For an instant, the spiderweb of the cocoon the Demogorgon wrapped him up in stretches out thin between them. It was probably too much to hope that this would be his chance to be like everyone else. He’s just about to motivate himself to leave the dorm before he has a full-on panic attack when footsteps down the hall make him reconsider.“It’sMIT, mom, I’msurethere will be kosher food in the dining hall,” someone is saying. “Oh, 204, this is it, looks like my roommate’s -Will Byers?”Will, frozen halfway between his bed and the door, stops and stares. His roommate’s shorter than him by a bit, stocky. He’s wearing what looks like three jackets over a battered green T-shirt with a nearly illegible print. He has a baseball camp jammed over unruly curls, and a wide, toothy grin splitting his face open.“Dustin!”OR: They were roommates. Oh my god, they were roommates
Relationships: Will Byers/Dustin Henderson
Comments: 12
Kudos: 53
Collections: Stranger Things Rare Pair Big Bang 2020





	The Right Time for Tenderness

**Author's Note:**

> Betaed by the amazing and wonderful briishere
> 
> Part of the [Stranger Things Rare Pair Big Bang](https://st-rarepairbang.tumblr.com/)

### SEPTEMBER

#### 09/02/1989

By the time they’re setting up the dorm room, Joyce is already tearing up.

She keeps it together long enough to help Will carry the battered mini-fridge he inherited from Jonathan up the stairs and to make a second Target run for things they forgot the first time, like a trash can and a desk lamp. By the time she’s plumping up his pillows, though, she’s sniffling a little obviously.

“Honey,” she says, turning to him with red-rimmed eyes. “Do you want me to stay?”

“I think we shouldn’t drag it out,” Will tells her.

“Yeah,” she chokes. “You’re probably right. Oh, _Will_.” She grabs him close in a too-tight hug, and Will hopes desperately his future roommate won’t pick this exact moment to walk in.

She tells him to call if he needs anything at all, that she’ll be at the motel room they’d stayed at last night until tomorrow morning, that she’ll be back home in their empty Chicago apartment by the evening.

He watches her leave from the window, waves when she waves from the car.

He’s the one wiping tears away.

Better to get it over with. Better to rip the Band-Aid off.

Will is the first one in the dorm except the extremely hung-over RA – he’s been early to every first day of school in his life and late to every other one since Kindergarten – so he doesn’t have a whole lot left to do but wait around, lingering in the hallway, leaving his door at just such an angle that he’ll see anyone coming into the suite – fourth floor of MacGregor, co-ed, words Will had studied for about three hours when he got the room assignment in the mail, imagining all the ways he could fuck up this living situation so he wouldn’t be surprised when they happened.

By noon, he’s only seen two Asian students moving in diagonally across from him, and they were speaking so fast to their parents he didn’t dare approach them. The first dorm activity on the schedule the RA gave him is only listed for two PM and Will is kind of paralyzed. Should he wander around campus? Try to meet people? There was something about a club fair, but Will was too worried about whether or not he’d get to pick which side of the room he gets to really pay attention.

Will stares down at his hands, spread on his bare knees. His fingers are weird-shaped, knobbly at the knuckles. For an instant, the spiderweb of the cocoon the Demogorgon wrapped him up in stretches out thin between them. It was probably too much to hope that this would be his chance to be like everyone else.

He’s just about to motivate himself to leave the dorm before he has a full-on panic attack when footsteps down the hall make him reconsider.

“It’s _MIT_ , mom, I’m _sure_ there will be kosher food in the dining hall,” someone is saying. “Oh, 204, this is it, looks like my roommate’s - _Will Byers_?”

Will, frozen halfway between his bed and the door, stops and stares.

His roommate’s shorter than him by a bit, stocky. He’s wearing what looks like three jackets over a battered green T-shirt with a nearly illegible print. He has a baseball camp jammed over unruly curls, and a wide, toothy grin splitting his face open.

“ _Dustin!_ ”

He starts towards Dustin, about to hug him, but pauses before he can make the jump, arms hanging awkwardly in mid-air. Is it weird? He hasn’t seen Dustin since the summer after eighth grade.

Dustin has no such compunctions and wraps him up tightly in a slightly damp embrace.

“Sorry,” he says. “I had to wear all my jackets because I ran out of space in my suitcase, but it turns out it’s really warm in September.”

A giggle shakes its way loose from Will’s chest. He grips Dustin tightly. “I am so glad to see you.”

Between the two of them, they get the shitload of boxes stacked up in Dustin’s car up into the dorm in record time.

“Oh, uh, we can still switch sides,” Will says awkwardly, dropping a box full of what looks like radio equipment onto the empty, creaky bed. “I just kind of took…”

“…the door side, that’s cool,” Dustin says. “The wall makes me feel safer anyway.” He says it so matter-of-factly that Will has to take a deep, shuddering breath, to remind himself that of course Dustin would _get_ that he needs to feel safe. He’d had a long, terrible night last night wondering what would happen if he woke up screaming or had a sudden-onset panic attack because a leaf threw a shadow that looks kind of like the Demogorgon.

Dustin won’t give a fuck.

“Oh, are you sure we shouldn’t go get you a real mattress?” Mrs. Henderson frets. “Or a second kettle? What if you need to make tea and soup at the same time?”

“ _Mom,_ ” Dustin groans.

“Am I doing it again?”

“Just a little bit.“

She sighs deeply and hugs him for what must be the twelfth time in the half hour they’ve been there. “You’ll call me, right?”

“Of course, ma,” he tells her, and hugs her back just as tight.

Will studies the wall intensely until they’re done with their goodbyes.

Dustin’s a little too bright-eyed when she’s gone, but he smiles widely and says, “So it’s almost time to meet the dorm. You ready for some _icebreakers_?”

-

Icebreakers are the fucking worst. The only thing that Will likes about them is that he and Clark, one of the Asian guys from across the hall he was too scared to talk to that morning, have shared approximately twelve commiserating groans.

Chris-the-RA is nothing but gleeful as he makes them arrange themselves in the common room first by alphabetical order of their last names, then in order of their birthdates, and then in loose groups based on their favorite ice cream flavors.

“Alright, guys,” Chris-the-RA says, way too enthusiastically for a guy who was clearly still kind of drunk when Will got here this morning, “now imagine this room is a map of United States of—uhh,” he pauses, catching sight of Clark. “Imagine this room is a map of the world! The couch is Antarctica, the window is China, and America’s the middle! You are the pin in the map marking where you’re from. You have two minutes! Go!”

In the scramble, Will forgets whether the couch is north or south, and he and Dustin get tangled around each other twice trying to sort out where they fit. “No,” Will mutters to him when Dustin tries to get him to stay still, “Chicago’s north of you.”

“Oh,” Dustin says. “Right.”

Will realizes, awkwardly, moments later, while they all present where they’re from, that Dustin probably thought they were from the same place. He had thought Dustin would say he was from Indianapolis, since he is, kind of. Who would want to admit being from Hawkins?

“Okay,” Chris-the-RA claps his hands together. “You get two sentences each. Tell us all where you’re from and what makes your hometown special.”

Will groans inwardly. It must read on his face, because about two couch cushions east of him, Clark suppresses a laugh badly. It’s godawful. Clark’s roommate has to start, and he’s from Osaka. He speaks better English than Will speaks Japanese, but he pretty obviously does not understand the point of whatever they’re doing here, and Will can’t fault him for it. Apparently, Osaka has really good public transportation. Christie from San Francisco is next, and she hopes the hills in Boston are less steep. Sue from San Antonio is a football fan.

“I’m from Chicago,” Will says when it’s his turn. “I don’t know, I guess we have better fire safety codes than we used to?” He swallows drily at the clench of ashes in his throat.

At least Dustin and Clark laugh.

“I’m from the bright lights of Hawkins, Indiana,” Dustin introduces himself (again), moments later. “We have one of the highest cow-to-human ratios in the Midwest.”

Will smirks.

There are a whole bunch of people crowded around Chris-the-RA in what Will presumes to be Boston. Clark is standing westwards of them.

“You’re next?” Chris-the-RA asks, a bit too nice, like Clark can’t be standing in the right place. Will cringes a little.

“I’m from Pittsburgh,” Clark says. “Please don’t make me say anything nice about Pittsburgh.”

Will sighs in relief and pretty much ignores everything everyone says about New York and Boston.

“Oh my god,” he groans into his plate of mashed potato and sausage a few hours later in the cafeteria. “Please, God, let there be no more icebreakers.”

“You’re missing the point.” Dustin gesticulates with his fork while he talks, and he still talks with his mouth full. “We all hated it so much that now we have the shared bonding experience of never wanting to do that ever again.”

“So it’s like a Stockholm syndrome thing?” Clark asks, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Like, we bond over the shared trauma inflicted on us by the unfeeling RA?”

“I think you’re giving Chris way too much credit,” Will says. “He seemed, uh…”

“Drunk as shit?” Dustin suggests.

“Maybe it’s a campus-wide conspiracy and he’s just a puppet.” Clark takes a bite of his sausage. “Oh hey, speaking of, wasn’t Hawkins the place with the weird government lab?”

“Uh, yeah,” Dustin says. “That’s our other claim to fame.”

Will busies himself intensely with his food.

“Cool. Did they really –”

“I was really young when it happened,” Dustin interrupts. “I didn’t really know what was going on.”

They sit in silence for a moment, and then Kin, Clark’s Japanese roommate, asks in a tone of supreme dread, “Uh, excuse me, will there be more of the games?”

Will drops his head onto the table. “I hope not,” he says.

Christie from San Francisco stops by their table just as they’re getting up to head back to the dorm. “Drinks in my room later,” she hisses surreptitiously. “Bring mixers!”

The thought of spending even more time with a bunch of strangers – and Dustin – sounds a little exhausting to Will, but he’s not going to miss out on the chance to make friends. It will only get harder from now on.

-

“Geez, you’re strong,” Christie says while Dustin lifts up her minifridge so Clark can stick his hand under it and get out the cigarette that rolled underneath.

Dustin shrugs with the minifridge still in his arms. “It’s a minifridge,” he says. “It’s not that heavy.”

“Do you, like, _lift_?” Will asks, delighted. It’s so incongruous with the Dustin he knew.

Dustin glowers at him. “I may have a workout routine,” he says. “It’s because I have cleidocranial dysplasia, some friends helped me work out how to encourage muscle growth even if my shoulders will always be weird.”

“Cleido-what?” Christie asks, snatching the cigarette out of Clark’s hands as Dustin sets the fridge back down.

“Cleidocranial dysplasia,” Will tells her. “It’s a genetic condition that makes your teeth and collarbones grow in weird.”

“Thanks, Dr. Byers.” Dustin takes a long sip of his rum-and-something. Will follows the line of his throat for a second with his eyes before shaking himself out of it. It’s just weird, to see Dustin like this, basically grown-up. In his head, Dustin had still been fourteen, with long hair and his teeth not fully grown in, telling Lucas and Max to shut the fuck up in the rearview mirror of a moving van.

A lot is kind of the same – they’d gone past the club fair before dinner, and Dustin had signed up for robotics, talking a mile a minute about all the crap he’d built in high school, after Will had left. Dustin’s diction is also still exactly the way Will remembers it, even if his teeth have grown in.

He doesn’t remember Dustin having muscle definition in his arms, though. Not the kind he does now. He doesn’t remember Dustin’s hair ever being this short, cropped close enough to the top of his head that his curls are just springy, bouncy things at the top of his scalp. He doesn’t remember Dustin having the kind of tact it took, at the club fair, to rest a warm hand on Will’s shoulder when Will lingered too long in front of the QSA stand to be casual.

He does remember Dustin being exactly the kind of friend who would sign up for the QSA first while Will was still working up the courage, who would take an Act Up ribbon and a lollipop from the stand and start chatting to the girl behind the desk about Doctor Who and let Will sign up unnoticed.

Clark elbows him in the side. “You okay?”

Will takes a long pull of his disgustingly sweet drink. “Yeah,” he says. “Just been a really long day.”

“I’ll say,” Clark agrees.

“Okay, okay,” Christie says, way too loud and kind of drunk. “Let’s play truth or dare!”

Internally, Will groans. He wonders if he could make a break for it, say he needs the bathroom and just go to sleep. But Dustin’s grinning like he knows it’s a dumb idea but he’s down for it anyway, and Clark’s looking reluctantly interested, and at least Will has gotten drunk and had sex before starting college so he’s not likely to embarrass himself. He thinks of what it would be like, in his and Dustin’s dark dorm room, with music floating down the hall, and he feels the light dust of ash on his skin, the tightness of a tentacle down his throat for a split second.

“Alright,” Will says. “I’m going first. Dustin, truth or dare?”

By the time they do make it to bed, Dustin’s more than a little out of it, weaving on his legs on the way back to their room. He collapses face-first on his bed, kicking his shoes off. “’M sorry,” he says into his pillow.

“You’re gonna be, if you don’t take off your pants before you pass out,” Will tells him.

“Naw, I mean, I know you don’t wanna have to room with me. We can,” he waves a floppy hand, “get it transferred or something.”

“Why wouldn’t I want to room with you?” Will asks.

Dustin shrugs. Except, since he’s lying down on his face, it’s more like a full-body shudder. “Don’know, but you stopped talking to me.”

Will’s heart squeezes in his chest. “I’m glad we ended up together,” he says.

Dustin’s already snoring.

Will lays on his side for long, quiet moments in his own bed, back to the wall, eyes on the door. He had been sure the first night would be the worst, that it would have to get better eventually. The concept of change for the better now seems impossible. He will always lie here, on this bed, in this room, and he will always watch the door. The hallway stretches out before him, empty and dark and full of ash, and the cocoon surrounding him forces his arms tight to his sides, immobile. Terror constricts his throat.

With effort, he loosens his arms from under the blanket, turns over onto his other side, and goes to sleep.

#### 09/03/1989

“Steve!” Dustin wraps the phone cord around his fingers as he talks. “You’ll never believe it!”

Will can hear Steve’s laugh, tinny through the off-white standard phone set hooked to their wall. He says something else, probably that Dustin should slow down or start from the beginning.

“No, no, Steve, _Will_ ’s my roommate. Will Byers. I mean, what are the odds?” His whole face lights up when Steve responds. Will’s not actually surprised he and Dustin are still friends. Dustin’s tenacious like that. It had been months of Will not finding the time to answer his letters and forgetting to change the batteries on his radio until Dustin stopped trying.

“Hey, hey, Will, I’m turning speakerphone on,” Dustin says, and a second later, Will hears Steve Harrington yelling _Jonathan_ distantly.

There are muffled, indistinct voices down the other end. “Hello?” Jonathan asks into the speaker eventually.

“Hi, Jonathan!” Dustin grins. “Guess who’s here with me?”

“Hey, Jon,” Will says. “It’s Will.”

“Hi.” Jonathan’s voice is distant on the phone, which is probably why he sounds so emotionless. “Wow. You guys are roommates?”

“Yeah,” Dustin says. “Crazy, right?”

“I think they put people together based on the hobbies they list,” Jonathan offers. “What did you guys put on?”

“D & D,” Will and Dustin chorus.

“Well, there you go,” Steve laughs. “Buncha nerds.”

They chat a few moments more, about orientation week and what to expect, and then the door in Steve and Jonathan’s apartment slams open because Billy’s home, and they all have to leave to pick up Nancy and do something Jonathan is super cagey about. Will assumes they’re going to get drunk.

“Hey,” Will says after they hang up. “They live together. Why did they never tell us we were going to the same college?”

Dustin pauses from getting his shoes out from under his bed. “That is an excellent question.”

“Maybe Steve didn’t tell Jonathan what college you chose?” Will hazards. “Or the other way around?”

“I talk to Jonathan sometimes when he gets to the phone first,” Dustin says, shaking his head. “I’m pretty sure I told him about MIT.”

Will frowns.

“Steve could have just forgotten to tell me?” Dustin suggests weakly.

“And Jonathan forgot to tell me?”

They look at each other blankly for a moment.

“Occam’s razor,” Dustin says eventually. “The simplest solution is that they decided to not tell us.”

“Why, though?”

“I don’t know.” Dustin’s jaw is setting into what Will remembers as his most stubborn set, the look he would get before derailing an entire science class because he was so persistently interested in some random question, the look he got before he called Mr. Clarke way past a reasonable hour, the look he got every time he had to interact with a librarian. “But I will make it my mission to find out.”

“I’ll help,” Will says before he can stop himself. He feels like he’s twelve, again, drawn into one of Dustin’s schemes. He kind of likes it.

#### 09/08/1989

The first Friday at college merits a blow-out party. Will had expected nothing less, and he’d been looking forward to it for two days, since the first rumors of an illicit keg in a suite four floors above theirs had reached their dorm. Dustin had a fake ID (“Billy’s going-to-college present,” he had said with a shrug) and he had gone to the liquor store with Christie and come back with a plastic handle of vodka.

Will had gone to the student lounge to buy ten cartons of Tropicana orange juice.

It felt significantly more lame, but the guy behind the till had still seen right through him and muttered “fucking freshmen,” under his breath as he rang Will up.

By nine PM, Will’s buzzed as hell, on his third drink (which is more vodka, less orange because they’d fucked up the calculation and are already running out of orange juice). He’s wearing probably the tightest T-shirt he owns and when he catches sight of himself in the bathroom mirror, he’s flushed and his hair is doing a thing he doesn’t hate. He feels like he’s really starting to get the hang of this college thing.

“Will!” Dustin cries excitedly when Will gets back to the room. “Did you pass the tile test?”

“What the fuck is the tile test?” Christie laughs from beside him.

“You know,” Dustin turns to her to explain. “When you go to the bathroom, and you’re drunk, and you look at the tiles on the floor. If you get dizzy and all the lines go all wrong you gotta stop drinking.”

She gives him a supremely unimpressed look. “That sounds like bullshit.”

Will looks away, sitting on his own bed next to Clark and Kin, who are still quietly discussing circuit boards because they’re disasters and don’t know how to speak to women, and reclaims his drink.

Dustin’s not distracted for long, which is endearing and also terrible, because he asks Will, “So, Byers, you looking to hook up tonight?”

Will feels his entire body flush. “Uh,” he says. “Don’t know?”

“I’m pretty sure that guy from New House was checking you out today,” Christie says, grinning over at him.

Not sure if he’s more embarrassed or relieved, Will lets out a deep breath. Dustin winks at him.

Of course.

Thirteen-year-old Dustin had fallen heavily onto the bleachers after his dance with Nancy at the Snow Ball, aka, the most embarrassing night of Will’s life to date. Not only was he still miserably shorter than all of his friends, not only was he clearly poorer than all of them put together in his hand-me-down suit, he was still being called zombie boy by half the school and he wasn’t really sure what to do with the uncomfortable feeling that watching Mike kiss El gave him.

“Y’know,” Dustin had said, “you really don’t have to dance with people who call you names.”

“It seemed polite,” Will had said helplessly.

“Why should you be polite if they aren’t?”

Dustin’s hair had looked ridiculous, and his eyes had still been a little red, but he made good points.

“Hey,” Will had said. “Let’s make a deal. You stop me from being nice to jerks. I’ll stop you from asking stuck-up girls to dance.”

They had shaken hands on it and spent the rest of the night loitering by the snack bar.

Dustin takes deals pretty seriously, and it seems like he’s still sticking to it. He had probably not-very-subtly vetted all their suitemates for their opinions on being gay before initiating this conversation. Christie’s not dumb, she probably put two and two together.

“Hey, wait,” Will says, shaking himself out of his reverie. “What guy from New House?”

“The one in the only class we have together,” Christie rolls her eyes at him. “You know, the cute one, with the buzzcut?”

Will looks at her cluelessly.

“With the Patriots sweatshirt?”

Will realizes she’d been trying very hard not to say “the black guy” at the same time Clark makes a dismissive noise. “Don’t hook up with a Patriots fan,” he says. “They’re all assholes.”

“I don’t think he was checking me out,” Will says. “He’s way out of my league.”

His friends are quick to tell him he’s absolutely, definitely wrong, even though no one besides Will and Christie has ever even seen New House Guy. A warm feeling settles in the pit of Will’s stomach that he tells himself is probably the booze.

“C’mon, Byers,” Dustin grins. “You know you’re a catch. I could put in a good word for you, tell him all about Will the Wise.”

“Shut up, Henderson,” Will says, not even a tiny bit as threatening as he wishes he could sound. “Or we’re gonna have to reenact the Neverending Story incident.”

They head up to the party around eleven, when the noise has started filtering down and they’re sure they won’t be the first people there. Will wonders vaguely who the RA on this floor is, if there even is one, because the music is way too loud and people are drinking openly, people he recognizes from his intro classes who definitely aren’t twenty-one. Within minutes, he has a warm, flat beer in a solo cup he doesn’t really remember being given and he and Dustin are enthusiastically drawn into a conversation about the advantages of playing Paladin versus Wizard.

Will’s not sure how long the conversation lasts – he needs the bathroom again (“You broke the seal too early, man,” Dustin tells him far too seriously) after the first beer and a half. He doesn’t pass the tile test this time. The vertigo makes him queasy, the fluorescent lights flicker and he catches sight of the grotesque pulse of that flower-petal mouth opening up in the dark.

“Leave me alone,” he whispers drunkenly to the Demogorgon, and the lights come back on.

When he gets back out, Dustin and Christie are dancing way too close in the dorm room with all the furniture shoved to the side. He almost doesn’t spot them at first, because the lights in that room are dimmed and there are so many people making out. So many. But he catches the reflection of the disco ball on Dustin’s hair and then he abruptly has to turn away.

He knew Dustin had a girlfriend in middle school – he was the only one who actually believed that story, because he knew Dustin wasn’t stupid enough to create a complex lie like a Mormon girlfriend he could only reach via satellite radio. If Dustin was going to invent someone, it would have been a moderately attractive girlfriend from a bigger city in the Midwest with whom he had parted ways amicably at the end of camp. It would have been much more believable, and Max would never have been able to prove him wrong, and it would have driven her crazy.

Since playing truth or dare on their first night here, Will also knows that Dustin has engaged in a handful of sexual acts.

Knowing it and seeing it are very different, and Will is not a fan.

 _Straight people_ , he thinks moodily, and then immediately hates himself for thinking it. _Just because you don’t want to see Dustin hooking up doesn’t mean it’s gross,_ he chastises himself, and goes to get another beer.

New House Guy finds him by the drinks.

“Will, right?” He asks over the music.

“Yeah,” Will yells back. “You’re in my Stats class, right?”

“Yeah,” New House Guy says. He might say his name, but Will doesn’t catch it and it’s too awkward to ask again. New House Guy says something else, but Will doesn’t catch that either.

“Huh?” He asks.

“I asked how you like the party,” New House Guy yells in his ear.

“Oh, it’s cool,” Will says. He lifts his solo cup, and beer sloshes over the side. “Free drinks.”

New House Guy smiles at him.

He really is out of Will’s league.

Over New House Guy’s shoulder, Clark gives Will an obnoxious thumbs-up.

Further over his shoulder, Will catches sight of Dustin cupping Christie’s cheek in one hand as they kiss.

He smiles up at New House Guy and asks him a random question about how he’s liking class.

By the time Dustin comes over to hiss in Will’s ear that he might want to take Christie back to their room, would that be okay, Will and New House Guy are leaned against the wall, close together.

“Sorry,” Will says to New House Guy as Dustin and Christie make for the staircase, hand in hand. “Roommate.”

“Shit,” New House Guy says – slurs, more. He’s been drinking just as much as Will. “Guess you don’t have anywhere to stay tonight.”

Panic shores up in Will’s throat, crippling him for a long moment. The Demogorgon’s fleshy, flower-petal face shivers in joy.

Taking a deep breath, Will leans closer to New House Guy. “Depends,” he says, and offers what he hopes is a charming smile.

“Oh yeah?” New House Guy says, his voice gone low enough to be more a vibration than a noise. “On what?”

“You,” Will tells him.

They don’t kiss at the party. It’s a risk Will’s not willing to take, not even at MIT, not even in 1989. They do kiss in the elevator, hurtling downwards. Will tries to ignore the queasy stretch of his stomach. He’s probably too drunk for this.

The walk to New House is cold and bracing, and lets Will sober up just enough to feel brazen instead of nauseous.

He blows New House Guy against the closed door to his dorm room in the dark and is silently thankful when, after, he’s too out of it to return the favor, instead crashing onto his single bed and haphazardly making space for Will to lie on the side closer to the door.

Will’s drunk enough to pass out in minutes despite the unfamiliarity.

At about four AM, he wakes up and has to run to the bathroom to puke out everything he drank and then some.

He sits on the rim of the bathtub for long, agonizing minutes after he’s done. It’s cold under his ass, but that keeps him grounded, keeps him from getting dizzy and throwing up again.

By the time he’s brave enough to get up and hold his head under the sink to drink some water, the Demogorgon’s behind him again.

“I wish you would just leave me alone,” Will mutters to its reflection. “This is getting pathetic, even for you.”

The Demogorgon cocks its head at him and slinks closer.

“Fuck this,” Will mutters. The door to New House Guy’s room is still cracked open where Will had run out. He tiptoes past it and back down the stairs. On the walk back, the air is still crisp and refreshing and Will inhales deeply and reminds himself that he’s an adult, that he’s at college, and that no one’s going to care if he stays out all night, and that that’s a blessing just as much as it is a curse.

Dustin’s got the desk light on when he gets back in. “Hey,” he whispers. “Good night?”

“Eh,” Will makes a see-sawing motion with his hand. “You?”

“Yeah,” Dustin says.

“You weren’t waiting for me, were you?” Will asks.

“Kinda,” Dustin says. “Just making sure I didn’t accidentally kick you out all night. Also Christie just left, like half an hour ago.”

“Oh,” Will says awkwardly. “Uh, you don’t have to – you can kick me out, if you guys are—”

“It was a one-time thing,” Dustin says. “No worries. Also, this is your room and I’m not gonna start kicking you out.”

“For more than four hours.”

“Yeah.”

Will laughs, goes to brush his teeth, and then falls asleep feeling at last like he’s not being watched.

#### 09/16/1989

Naturally, Dustin gains a reputation as a total player, given that a girl came back to his room for four full hours and she’s still talking to him afterwards. Clark, whose Never Have I Ever record is even worse than Will’s, because he didn’t get spectacularly drunk and have sex with a guy who’s name he doesn’t even know in the first week, is desperate for his advice.

“Nah, dude, there’s plenty of ways to drag it out.” Dustin tells him the next weekend, taking a big sip of his beer. “Mostly it’s just thinking too much, though.”

Will shakes his head. “ _How_ did you turn into the sexpert?” He’s way too tired for this conversation, fresh off his first shift at his work-study job at the library. He had applied on the assumption it would involve a lot less human interaction than it actually did, and now he’s exhausted.

“Four of my cousins got married the summer before senior year,” Dustin says. “It was, uh, instructive.”

“What, did you just fuck a bunch of bridesmaids all summer?” Clark leans back against the wall, tipping his head back to drain his beer. “Was this, like, the summer everything changed and you came back and were suddenly popular?”

Dustin laughs. “Have you met me? I pull with a very specific subset and that is engineering majors and Jewish nerds.”

“So were the bridesmaids Jewish or engineers?” Will doesn’t actually want to know, this whole conversation is weirdly off-putting, but he asks anyway out of a morbid curiosity he doesn’t even really want filled.

“Uh, neither, but the groomsmen were both.”

“Oh, shit.” Clark laughs loudly enough that Will’s own noise of surprise is swallowed by it. “Damn, no wonder you have all the luck, you have all the options.”

“It’s not luck, man, it’s being a good listener and, like, talking about sex.”

“Guess I’ll have to try that some day.”

It’s quiet in the room for a second, only the sound of the music and the slurp of their drinks.

Will can’t help himself.

He knows it’s impolite.

He has to ask anyway.

“I didn’t know you were bi,” Will mumbles through numb lips. “I thought you were just, like, showing solidarity. With the Act Up stuff.”

Dustin guffaws. “Dude, I am really not that selfless.”

He’s absolutely lying.

The party’s wild, and loud, and full of people Will vaguely recognizes from the matriculation ceremony when they get there. He wonders if he’ll ever graduate to the chill house parties he imagined college would be full of. They’d probably need houses for that. He sticks close to Clark, Kin, and Dustin, hoping this time to not make too many regrettable decisions. This doesn’t stop him from trying the jello shots, which sound like a great idea but taste like cough syrup and carpet cleaner.

“You’re never gonna meet someone like that,” Will points out to Clark, who has found a comfortable spot against the wall to lean against. “You should dance or something.”

Clark gives him a terrified look.

With a sigh, Will grabs Clark by one elbow and Kin by the other and drags them over to where Dustin is chatting with Christie and Sue, Christie’s roommate, who Will likes much, much more by virtue of the fact that she has not yet had sex with Dustin.

 _Being an asshole again,_ Will warns himself.

“Will!” Christie says brightly, and Will feels like even more of an asshole because he does actually like her and they are actually friends and she doesn’t even know how weird he feels about knowing she and Dustin…did stuff. It’s not her fault this weird, confident new Dustin is throwing him off.

So he smiles back at her, says “Christie!” and force-feeds the whole group more jello shots.

“Noo, Will,” Dustin moans, “I have to study tomorrow, this psych class is kicking my ass—”

“It’s only been two weeks,” Will says. “You can’t possibly be behind. You will get drunk with me.”

“Ugh, traitor.” Dustin downs the jello shot, not at all reluctantly.

It’s maybe not his best strategy ever, and Will certainly doesn’t want to give Clark any of his terrible coping mechanisms, but it doesn’t take Clark long to be drunk enough to actually hold a conversation with Christie and Sue.

Dustin gives Will a low five behind Christie’s back.

It gives Will a little thrill, low in his belly, to be in cahoots with Dustin. It reminds him of being a kid again, when their secrets had to do with the next campaign. He likes the uncomplicated happiness in the pit of his belly, when Christie decides that she danced with Dustin last week, it’s Will’s turn now, and Dustin watches them do an incredibly poor man’s cha cha, laughing his ass off. It makes him feel like maybe, just maybe, he’d finally reclaimed some part of everything he lost in 1983, when he and Dustin stumble back to their room (both alone) at three thirty in the morning, laughing over something Clark had said.

### OCTOBER

#### 10/04/1989

It takes Will a couple weeks to realize he’s feeling incredibly tense. His classes are fine. He’s made new friends and rekindled his friendship with Dustin. He’s starting to get a routine at MIT. But he hasn’t shared a room since the first year they lived in Chicago, when he and Jonathan had to double up so El could have her own room. At the time, Will hadn’t really appreciated what a sacrifice that must have been for Jonathan.

He gets back from an evening shift at the library at eleven PM to find Dustin fast asleep on his twin bed, sprawled out on his stomach with his cheek pillowed gently on his hand. His Psych textbook is open in front of him and his reading glasses are crooked on his nose.

Will kicks off his shoes and pushes them toward his dresser gently, then turns the dial on the lamp by his bed up just enough that he can see, not enough to bother Dustin too much. He considers for a moment, and then he pads over to Dustin and gently pulls off his glasses so the frames don’t get bent. For good measure, Will pries the textbook out from under him gently and sets in on Dustin’s desk. Dustin makes a soft, pleased noise in his sleep and curls himself onto his side, facing away from Will. The sheet slips down just a bit to reveal the definition in Dustin’s biceps where they peer out from the cuffs of his t-shirt. Workout regime indeed.

Shaking his head in what might be exasperation and might also be affection, Will crosses over to his side of the room again. He shimmies out of his jeans and pulls off his socks. He slides under the covers of his bed and clicks off the light, turning towards the wall.

Ten minutes later, he turns over.

Ten minutes after that, he turns back.

After another ten minutes, he lays down on his back to stare at the ceiling.

He scratches a phantom itch at his left hipbone with his right hand.

Sensation zings across his entire groin when his wrist brushes up against the front of his boxer shorts.

Shit. It’s absolutely no wonder, none at all, that that’s what he’s been missing for the last few weeks, that that’s why he’s strung so tight.

He rubs his palm over the front of his boxers, just to take the edge off.

It has the opposite effect. The edge is still very on. The edge has gotten sharper, if anything.

He sneaks a look over at Dustin.

Dustin’s still fast asleep. Nothing will wake him up at this point, Will knows from experience.

Under the cover of darkness, under his actual covers, Will sneaks a hand into his boxers. He strokes himself slowly, from root to tip, and suppresses a groan of relief. It’s been so long. Once or twice a week, quickly in the shower, when he’s got five minutes, max, before someone starts banging on the door, does not cut it.

He lets his mind go as he strokes himself off, thoughts buzzing indistinctly back and forth between the stresses of the day and his upcoming midterms and Dustin falling asleep on his textbook again and breakfast tomorrow with Dustin and how he needs to tell him about the crazy guy at the reference desk today. In what seems like no time at all, Will’s fully hard and throbbing in his own fist, even in the absence of a concrete fantasy. He strokes faster, trying to get it over with quick.

He almost misses the shift of skin on sheets across the room, almost misses when the furtive sound of skin on skin joins his.

His toes curl.

For an instant, he pauses. Just to make sure he’s right about what he’s hearing. But there it is, the huff of Dustin’s breath, the slick sound of his fist on his cock. Will wonders if he’s just that wet, if he’s already leaking, if he’d been dreaming something good when Will came home and this is just the natural consequence. He’d kind of thought Dustin would be loud, had even gotten proof two weeks ago, when Dustin and some girl from Dustin’s robotics club had kept him trapped at a party for two full hours. Now, though, when Will’s own hand picks up again, he could almost pretend it’s just him, that Dustin’s still fast asleep. He wonders if Dustin’s biting his lip to keep quiet, like he does sometimes when he’s concentrating.

It doesn’t take long. Now that Will’s realized how pent-up, how frustrated he’d been, he’s riding the edge to orgasm almost instantly. He catches the drip of precome with his thumb on the upstroke and shudders at the influx in feeling when he strokes down again. He fumbles his other hand down to cup his balls, full and heavy, and squeezes too hard just for an instant to drag it out that extra bit longer. The hitch of Dustin’s breath across the room startles him into his own orgasm, and he sprays warm and wet across his knuckles up to his bellybutton.

Will’s never made a noise when he comes, too used to keeping quiet first in their tiny apartment and now at MIT. Even when he was dating Eric, back in Chicago, or hooking up with some guy at a party, Will was quiet, during, hiding his face and his reactions and everything. He doesn’t know how to be anything else.

Except now, apparently, when the intensity of the orgasm shocks a gasp out of him, loud in the quiet room.

Will turns towards the wall, heart rabbiting in his chest. This seems like not a normal occurrence. This seems like something they’re going to have to talk about. This seems like he crossed a boundary, like it’s not okay, like it’s a breach of trust. He’s terrified Dustin’s about to get up, turn on the light, and _talk about what they just did_ for a full minute, staring blindly at the wall. He ignores the creeping silhouette of the Demogorgon’s arm, reaching for him from under his bed.

But Dustin doesn’t get up, his breath evens out into what sounds like sleep again, and Will drifts off not long after.

In the morning, they get breakfast and Will tells him about the weird guy at the reference desk.

#### 10/18/1989

_Begin recording_

**Dial tone**

_Will_ : Hey, Jonathan.

 _Jonathan_ : Hey, what’s up?

 _Will_ : So, I was wondering, when I’m there for Thanksgiving, could you teach me how to roll a joint?

 _Jonathan_ : No.

 _Will_ : Wha—why not?

 _Jonathan_ : No.

 _Will_ : Please?

 _Jonathan_ : Absolutely not.

 _Will_ : I just don’t see _why_ not, I’m eighteen –

 _Jonathan_ : Eighteen is not twenty-one.

 _Will_ : Come on, I know you were totally smoking and drinking the entire time you were at Hawkins High.

 _Jonathan_ : I definitely don’t remember that being part of my freshman year, no.

 _Will_ : _Jonathan_.

 _Jonathan_ : Look, it’s different when it’s you.

 _Will_ : Jesus fucking Christ, what—

 _Steve_ : Will – Will? Hey, Will, chill out.

 _Will_ : He’s being ridiculous.

 _Steve_ : You know that, and I know that –

 _Jonathan (distantly)_ : Hey!

 _Steve_ : -- but you’ve got to accept that he’s just being your big brother.

 _Will_ : _You_ taught Dustin how to roll joints, how is this different?

 _Steve_ : I _did not_ , you take that back.

 _Dustin (distantly)_ : Yeah you did, last Spring Break, you were totally baked and you said I’d need to know for college and Billy had some extra papes—

 _Steve_ : BILLY.

 _Billy (distantly)_ : What did I do now?

 _Steve_ : Corrupted the innocent youths of America.

 _Billy (distantly)_ : Uh-huh. Gee. Sorry ‘bout that.

 _Jonathan_ : If my brother turns into a stoner drop-out because of you two—

 _Billy (distantly)_ : Leave me out of whatever this is. I have an essay.

 _Steve_ : It’s not _my_ fault they’re like this—

 _Nancy_ : If you don’t all shut up right now, I’m going to have to resort to drastic measures.

 _Jonathan_ : Hey, uh, Will, I’m gonna have to call you back. Please don’t do drugs.

**Dial tone**

_End recording_

“Right,” Dustin says, pressing pause on the recorder. “That was interesting.”

Will wipes his sweaty palm off on his jeans. “I’m still not sure how ethical it is to deliberately antagonize them. Or record them.”

“It’s a blind study,” Dustin argues. “Like the Milgram experiment. We’ll never learn if we tell them what we’re doing. Oh, come on, why are you making that face?”

Will shrugs. “I also kind of think the Milgram experiment was unethical.”

“Oh, it was,” Dustin says. “Definitely. Look, I’ll tell them about it when we have some results.”

“Fine,” Will sighs. “What did we learn?”

“Nancy has them all _so whipped_.”

Will throws a pillow at Dustin.

“No, no, stop it, no, I concede!” Dustin gasps as Will continues to clobber him with the pillow.

“I’m serious, though,” Dustin says once he’s caught his breath. “Like, Nancy rules that household. Maybe it was her idea to not tell us we were both going to MIT?”

Will frowns. “She is pretty devious. She burned me with a radiator.”

Dustin blinks at him. “The fuck?”

“You weren’t there for that part,” Will tells him. “It burned the Mind Flayer out of me, so it worked. But I still have the scar.”

“Shit.”

“I can see this being Nancy’s idea.”

“Mm.”

“Are you not convinced? It was your idea?”

Dustin taps his pen against the notepad he was writing on while Will was on the phone. “I think we’re neglecting Billy’s role. He seems like kind of the dark horse in all this. But he _did_ kind of push Steve into teaching me to roll, now that I think about it.”

“I was always kind of scared of him,” Will admits.

“He got better,” Dustin says, “after everything at Starcourt. He spends a lot of time pretending not to give a shit, but it’s a pretty transparent lie.”

Will rests his head in his hands. “How are you so good at this?”

“Huh?”

“Reading people? I just kind of thought Billy was a dick.”

Dustin shrugs. “I listen more than you’d think.”

“Maybe you should keep studying psych,” Will jokes.

Dustin’s silence is deafening. He draws his shoulders in tight, like he used to when Troy and James started teasing him.

“Dustin?”

“I thought about it,” Dustin says. “But people said it would be a waste of my science and engineering abilities. Soft science, y’know.”

“Who’s people?”

“Mike.”

“Mike’s a _dick_ ,” Will says, harsh and loud. “You’d be _great_ at psych and you clearly love it. Fuck him.”

It only supports Will’s point that Dustin looks over at him, swallows heavily and says, “Thanks,” without asking whatever happened between Will and Mike.

#### 10/22/1989

For a moment, Will thinks he woke up to Dustin coming in. It happens, sometimes, when Dustin meets someone and goes back to their place (at the end of September, he’d stayed over at “Maggie’s place, you know, Maggie from my psych class” and Will had woken up at five AM, terrified that Dustin wasn’t coming back). Sometimes he stays late in the library, studying, and wakes Will up when he gets back in.

Today they’d gone to bed at the same time, though. Will remembers, because they’d turned out the lights together. They’d turned out the lights together, and then long, agonizing moments had passed before he’d heard the rustle of Dustin’s cover as he reached beneath it to palm at himself, until they’d jerked off together in the darkness again.

In the weeks since it happened first, Will’s gotten more and more used to the idea that it’s not going to ruin everything, that it’s just a thing they do now, like going to class and getting mozzarella sticks when Dustin’s stressed out. He’s actually started to play with it – to drag it out, to see if Dustin will drag it out with him, if they’re really doing this together.

(They are.)

Tonight, he’d made it last half an hour, dragging himself away from the edge every time he got close. Dustin had been panting on the other side of the room and the image of what he must look like, head thrown back, eyes glassy, had sent Will hurtling into orgasm with a gasp. His boxer shorts are stiff under the covers where he wiped his hand on them before rolling over and falling asleep.

Which brings him to the question of what woke him up.

There are only really three things that actually wake Will up.

1\. Dustin, coming in after he’s gone to sleep.  
2\. His alarm clock.  
3\. The Demogorgon, wrapping his chest up tight in its cocoon until he wakes up because he can’t scream.

Tonight, it’s none of those. It’s Dustin, snuffling in his sleep. He doesn’t snore – old friends or no, if he had, Will would have requested a transfer ages ago. He’s actually completely still and quiet in sleep, which had surprised Will. He’s caught himself watching Dustin sleep, the only time he can actually categorize the softness of Dustin’s features, when they’re not constantly in motion.

So this – Dustin moving in his sleep, Dustin making noise, this isn’t normal.

Will sits up, squinting over to Dustin’s side of the room in the dark. Dustin’s face is usually placid in sleep, but now it’s all furrows, clenched tight in so many places.

Will’s on his feet and across the room before he can really think about it. He flicks on the lamp on Dustin’s desk, rests his hand on Dustin’s shoulder. “Hey,” he whispers. “Hey, Dustin, c’mon, wake up.”

Dustin struggles against his hand for a brief moment, grabbing at it with his own hand before he starts to blink awake.

“Steve,” is the first thing he says. “Steve, hurry up, they’re gonna get you.”

Then, slower, “Will?”

“Yeah,” Will says. “It’s me. You’re fine.”

“’M not in Hawkins,” Dustin says – slurs, really, still figuring out what’s going on. Still holding Will’s hand tight to his shoulder.

“You’re in Boston,” Will tells him. “You’re at college. It’s 1989.”

“Right,” Dustin says. “Right.”

He takes a deep, shuddering breath and lets go of Will.

“Was it the Russians?” Will asks.

“Demodogs,” Dustin says. “Those caves. I tripped. I nearly got trapped there. Steve saved me. Nearly died for it.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

They’re quiet for a while, Will still kneeling awkwardly by the head of Dustin’s bed.

“Sorry I woke you up.”

“Fuck off.”

Dustin angles his head up to look at him quizzically.

“Never apologize for that,” Will says. “Do you even know how many fucked up dreams I have?”

“Haven’t woken me up with them yet.”

“Just you wait,” Will tells him.

Dustin laughs a little, head lolling back on his pillow. “Ugh,” he says. “Would you judge me if I just, like, got up and washed my sheets right now? Nightmare sweats are the worst.”

“No judgment,” Will promises. “I might fall asleep again though.”

“Eh,” Dustin says.

“Hey, Dustin?” Will asks, scrambling up to sit on Dustin’s desk chair since his knees have started stinging on the rough carpeting.

“Yeah?”

“Was it…” he rephrases mid-sentence. “How bad was it, with the Demodogs? I was. Well. Not there.”

Dustin sits up slowly and turns to lean against the wall. His blanket pools around his hips and Will’s hindbrain wonders if he has dried come lining his boxer shorts, too. “It was bad,” Dustin says.

Will looks at him steadily. He won’t ask again if Dustin doesn’t want to say more, but he’s always kind of felt – left out. When it came to the Upside Down, all he has are complicated feelings of fear, of helplessness, of anger and loneliness. He never went through what everyone else did, not until Starcourt, and even then, he and Dustin were never in the same place at the same time.

“It was my fault,” Dustin says after a while. “I took in that fucking Demodog, and I should have known better. I saw the Demogorgon, I knew what they looked like. I was still all gung-ho to raise a mini one in my terrarium.”

“You didn’t know it was one,” Will points out. “Also, we were just kids.”

“It ate my cat,” Dustin says hollowly. “My mom – my mom loved that cat. You know what she’s like.”

Will does, actually. The rest of the party hadn’t liked hanging out at Dustin’s house much, because Mrs. Henderson was so cloying in her attention, always making sure they had enough to eat and drink, occasionally borrowing Dustin for important questions about what snacks would be okay and whether she should go out to get more. Will had kind of secretly liked it there. It reminded him of his own mom, if she had enough money to worry about dumb stuff. He liked how Mrs. Henderson talked to Dustin like a co-conspirator, like she trusted his opinions and was working with him, even while she smothered them all in attention and anxiety.

“Anyway,” Dustin says. “There were too many of them. You know how many of them there were, they were at the lab.”

“They were part of me,” Will corrects. “I was the Mind Flayer. They were all – me.”

Dustin swallows heavily. “Right.” He plucks at his blanket. “Well. When your family was burning that out of you—”

“And Nancy,” Will points out.

“Right,” Dustin says. “Nancy and the radiator. While that was happening, Billy showed up to find Max.”

Will nods. He remembers coming back to the house to find Billy Hargrove passed out on the floor, tranquilizers still in his system. They had all been too exhausted and confused to do much more than leave him lying there until Steve got back with the rest of the party and explained what had happened, more than a little hazy himself with a concussion.

“We got it into our heads that we could help,” Dustin says. “We thought, if we distracted the Demodogs, down in the tunnels, El and Hopper could get the gate closed.”

“It worked.”

“I don’t know how we survived,” Dustin says blankly. “I think about it sometimes, now. I was dumb, then. You know how you don’t really get that situations are dangerous, when you’re younger?”

Will shakes his head.

“I went hiking, with my parents, once,” Dustin says. This must have been a long time ago, if his parents were still married. “It was in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We were staying at my cousin’s place. There was this really narrow path at the edge of a steep drop, and I was eight, and I just ran across it. My dad yelled at me so much, and I didn’t get it.” He runs a hand through his hair, and Will thinks it might be in part to hide his face. “After Starcourt, sometimes I had nightmares that I had fallen off the side of that path and died. It took Starcourt for me to understand how reckless I had been.”

“I think that’s normal kid stuff,” Will says, as gently as he knows how.

“That, yeah,” Dustin says. “But now I think about those tunnels. We have no proof we needed to be there. We could all have died. I nearly did. Steve nearly did. Twice that night. Billy almost killed him, and then we almost got him killed all over again.”

“I think Steve’s forgiven all of you,” Will points out.

“Steve’s too nice for his own good, and also kind of a pushover,” Dustin says blankly. “We were thirteen and our best weapon was Lucas’s wrist rocket. Steve was trying to keep us alive. He didn’t even want us to be there, we basically kidnapped him. And the next year, I did it all over again with that fucking Russian transmission. If I had just left it—”

“If you had just left it, the Mind Flayer would have still come back and we wouldn’t have had the first idea where the Russians were opening the gate,” Will says. “For what it’s worth, I was always glad to have you on my team.”

Dustin laughs again, but it doesn’t sound like him, it sounds bitter.

“Dustin,” Will says, reaching out to touch again but landing awkwardly at Dustin’s ankle when he realizes he can’t reach more of Dustin. “You’re all still here. You didn’t get anyone killed.” _Unlike me_ , echoes in his head.

“Neither did you,” Dustin says. Will’s face must be more transparent than he thought. “You were possessed. That’s the definition of not your fault.”

Will’s not sure he agrees. “Can we blame the US government instead?” He asks, trying desperately to lighten the mood.

“Sure,” Dustin says. “Those fuckers.”

Will clears his throat, searching desperately for anything to distract them from all this. “So I guess it wasn’t Steve’s idea to not tell us we were both going to MIT.”

“Definitely not,” Dustin agrees. “But if any of the other three asked him to, he’d do it.”

“Because he’s a pushover.”

“And too nice for his own good.”

“Right.”

They sit together in exhausted silence for a while before Dustin gathers up his bedsheets and heads for the laundry room. As he leaves, Will spots a smudge of tacky, dried come just above the top of his boxers.

#### 10/31/1989

Max finally comes to visit them on Halloween.

“Mayfield!” Dustin laughs, lifting her up and spinning her around when they pick her up from the MIT station.

“Ugh,” Max says, slapping at his shoulder, “let me down, Henderson, this is not cute.”

“Agree to disagree,” slips out of Will’s mouth before he can stop himself. It’s adorable.

He and Max were never all that close. He only knew her for a couple months before he left. At the time, he’s uncomfortably aware, he had seen her as one more person in the way of things being the way they used to be, when it was just the party. It had been so hard to accept that his friends, who he relied on to keep some semblance of normalcy when everything went straight to hell, were all moving on and growing up and he just…wasn’t there yet.

“Hey, Will,” Max says, and to his surprise, she hugs him, too.

“How’s UMass treating you?” Will asks into her hair, which is cropped short behind her ears.

“It’s great,” she says. “I can’t believe it took us this long to meet up. College is crazy.”

He laughs. “Tell me about it.” They had meant to go visit her three weekends in a row – it’s only twenty minutes away on the red line, after all – but they had gotten sidetracked or drunk every single time.

“Oh yeah?” They start walking towards the dorms, cutting across Briggs field. MacGregor’s tower looms over them. “Have you been breaking a lot of hearts? Or do you still have some girl pining over you in Chicago?”

Will blushes and looks at his feet. “Uh, I’m gay, Max.”

“Oh,” she says. “Goddammit, Dustin, why didn’t you tell me?”

Dustin holds his hands up in self-defense. “I don’t go around outing people!”

Will peers over at him. “You kinda outed me to the whole suite, remember?”

“I was trying to make sure they wouldn’t be dicks to you.”

“You kinda outed Billy and Steve to me, remember?” Max adds.

“That was not my fault, I didn’t know you were going to walk in on them when I asked you to get more drinks,” Dustin whines. “I’m sorry!”

Max laughs brightly and Will recognizes that he probably missed out on not keeping in touch with her, too.

“So why today?” He asks, when they get settled in the common room in the suite, Max curled up on the couch with a drink. “Aren’t there big Halloween blowouts at UMass?”

Max shrugs. “Sure, I guess. Not really my thing.”

Will remembers her being very into Halloween, but she had been thirteen at the time.

“Oh,” Dustin says. “We were gonna take you to a party here. But if you don’t want to—”

“No, that’s not it,” she says quickly. “I just. Halloween for adults sucks. It’s all about getting laid. All my friends at UMass are, uh.”

“Putting on super slutty costumes and getting trashed?” Will supplies.

Max grimaces. “I would say something nicer than that,” she says, and then doesn’t. Instead, she picks at her fingernail. “They’ve been after me to meet someone, you know, get out there.” The last she says with a roll of her eyes.

Dustin winces in sympathy. “Are we still not saying the L-word?” He asks.

“You can mention the little shitstain,” she says darkly. “Can’t promise I won’t stab you in the thigh with this spoon.” She lifts the plastic spoon out of her coffee and brandishes it threateningly.

Will has gleaned from Dustin’s infrequent phone calls with both Max and Lucas that they had dated on and off all through high school, but broke up for good when Lucas got a basketball scholarship to Notre Dame and Max got a full ride to UMass. “It was the first time Lucas was the one to dump _her_ ,” Dustin had told him solemnly, the effect ruined by the approximately twenty-eight Fritos in his mouth. “She didn’t take it well.”

“Noted.” Dustin eyes the spoon warily, probably calculating the force she’d need to use to get that thing in through his jeans and his skin, fully aware that she would do it. “We promise to guard you from having to feel human emotion tonight.”

Max raises an eyebrow. “You speak for Will, too?”

“Sure,” Will says. “I hate human emotion. It’s the worst.”

They’re on their first round of Dr. Pepper mixed with Crystal Palace vodka (which sounds like it ought to be fancy and is in fact a headache in a plastic handle) when Clark and Sue get in, windswept and bundled up in winter clothes despite it still being October.

“Max, this is Clark and Sue, she’s from southern climes and thus too weak to withstand the cold. He has no excuse,” Dustin introduces them, one hand clasped around his solo cup and the other resting on Max’s knee while she paints his nails black to match his Dracula costume. Any chance for Dustin to emphasize his teeth.

“Fuck you, too,” Sue grumbles, at least in part because it’s true.

“You find costumes?” Will asks.

“I’m going as a cat,” Sue says and disappears into her and Christie’s room.

“She means she’s putting on a headband with cat ears and a black sweater,” Clark whispers. “I think she really hates this holiday.”

Two days prior, Christie’s penetrant enthusiasm had finally won out and she had convinced them all to go to an off-campus house for a “rager” two streets away instead of to the usual dorm-room blow-outs they went to. “It’s our first Halloween at college!” She had said excitedly, many times. “We have to make it count!”

She had been working on her costume for weeks.

“What are you going as?” Will asks.

Clark holds up a superman T-shirt and a pair of fake, black-rimmed glasses.

“Wow,” Will deadpans. “Solid effort. We can even call you the same name.”

Clark gives him the finger and goes to get changed.

Max didn’t bring a costume, and she glares at Will and Dustin as they get changed as if to dare them to comment. Will’s not dumb enough to try, hopping around his side of the room trying to get into the leggings in the same shade of purple as his old Will the Wise cape he had stuffed into the bottom of his suitcase in August, just in case. He’s never been so thankful to have been sentimental, because Halloween costumes are expensive.

“I can’t believe you still do Halloween,” Max grumbles, draining her solo cup and going for a refill.

“Don’t be a killjoy just because you hate it,” Dustin tells her. “You goblin.”

“Whatever,” she says. For a moment, Will remembers her at fourteen, flipping her hair over her shoulder and stalking away from Mike and Lucas (and kind of him, as well) at the mall. Then, he remembers her at a different fourteen, kneeling over her step-brother’s broken body and sobbing.

He shivers a little and pulls the cape closer around himself.

The house party is, objectively, god-awful. Depending on the room, there’s either way too much or way too little light. It’s stiflingly warm, but out back on the patio it’s freezing cold and Will ends up smoking three cigarettes because you can’t just say you went outside to get some fresh air at a college party. There are always massive lines for the bathroom and at one point, Will’s pretty sure he sees traces of cocaine on the closed toilet lid before he pushes it up to take a piss.

He stumbles back out to find his friends and realizes that he’s not sure if he’s drunk or just overstimulated. Someone presses a drink into his hands and drags him toward the kitchen, and Will realizes way too late it’s New House Guy.

“Oh, hi,” he gets out, and New House Guy smiles at him.

“I was hoping to find you,” he says. “You always duck out of class so fast.”

 _That’s on purpose,_ Will thinks, but manages not to say. “Yeah,” he lies instead, “I have another class right after.”

“I was wondering if you might wanna hang out again, sometime,” New House Guy says.

“Uh,” Will says. “Maybe? I gotta find – I came with some people, I’ll catch you later.”

Then, he runs away.

Christie is mercifully easy to spot; she has a pair of gauzy butterfly wings strapped over her back and bright, colorful makeup on. “Hide me,” Will whispers to her, ducking in to stand between her and Max, who stands out as well in her sweatshirt and jeans and absolutely defiantly no effort.

“What’s wrong?” Christie asks way too loudly.

“New House Guy is here,” Will tells her. “He wants to hang out again.”

“Ohmygod,” Christie says. “Ohmygod, do you want to?”

“No!” Will says. “Get me out of here.”

It turns out that the front of the house is less crowded than the patio, little groups of people sharing cigarettes all over the front yard. Will breathes a sigh of relief and sits down heavily on the porch steps.

Max plops down next to him. “So what was that all about?”

“Some guy from our stats class that Will hooked up with one time wanted a repeat,” Christie explains. “Apparently, it was that terrible.”

Will doesn’t exactly want to explain that just the thought of New House Guy’s dick makes him remember throwing up alone in someone else’s bathroom. He also doesn’t really want to admit he still doesn’t know the guy’s name and it’s way too late to ask.

“Ah,” Max says.

Will drops his face into his hands.

“Where’d everyone else go?” He asks, muffled, before reaching for the drink New House Guy had given him and downing it in one go.

“Well,” Christie says, “I think – I _think_ \- Clark and Sue are somewhere around here. Kin went home, it’s too people-y for him here. And Dustin’s got some guy up against that window right there.”

Will looks over and promptly spills his drink.

“Jesus,” he hisses. “Warn a guy.”

He looks away a moment too late, now forever unable to unsee what Dustin looks like kissing another man.

Christie shrugs, nonplussed.

“Does that not bother you?” Will asks.

“Nah,” she says.

“ _How_?” Will asks, partially out of curiosity and partly because he wishes desperately it didn’t bother him.

“He told me before we did anything that he wasn’t looking for a relationship,” Christie says. “We’re cool. Besides, he made me come—”

“No!” Will yells, very loudly. “Please no details.”

“I wanna know,” Max says, stealing Will’s drink.

Christie whispers something in her ear and her eyebrows shoot up.

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go check on Sue.” Christie wanders back towards the house and gets immediately involved in a conversation with four guys, none of whom are Sue, before the door even closes.

“You doing okay, Byers?” Max asks, bemused.

“Ugh,” Will moans, sinking back to lean uncomfortably against the porch steps. “Who even knows. Gimme that.”

Between the two of them, they drain the solo cup full of jungle juice way too fast. It’s incredibly sweet, so sweet Will doesn’t know how strong it is until he finds himself asking, “You really miss him, don’t you?”

Max looks over at him and Will’s alarmed to see tears in her eyes. “Shut up,” she says gruffly, and Will’s reminded instantly of what Billy sounds like on the phone sometimes. “I do not.”

“You know it’s okay, to miss him?” Will asks.

“Do you miss Mike?”

Will freezes.

“What, you think just because you losers lost touch I stopped talking to El?” Max is defiant, smirking. Will hates her a little.

“I know you didn’t,” he says. “I just thought…”

“You just thought she wouldn’t tell me what he did,” Max concludes.

“Yeah.”

“Well, she did.”

“Good for you.”

“Jeez,” Max says, leaning away from him. “Bitter much?”

Will shrugs. “She hasn’t talked to me about it since it happened. She doesn’t talk to me much at all anymore.”

“Do you talk to her?”

Will looks away. “That’s not – it’s not the same thing.”

“Yeah, she grew up in a lab and doesn’t know how to talk to people.”

“Fuck you.”

Max sighs. “Look,” she says. “I’m sorry. Mike’s a dick.”

“So is Lucas,” Will says.

“No, he’s not,” Max sighs. “Look, I’m only telling you this because I’m drunk and you’re sad, but Lucas was probably right. We would have never made long-distance work.”

Will swallows heavily. “You still miss him, though.”

“Yeah,” Max shrugs. “Didn’t you miss everyone, when you stopped talking to them?”

Will had to throw out his radio when he was sixteen and lonely and the shadow of the Demogorgon on his wall, the clutch of the cocoon around his throat, the tentacle all the way down in his belly was just too much of a temptation to call someone – anyone – in Hawkins who would understand.

“Of course I did,” Will says.

“They wouldn’t have all taken Mike’s side,” Max says.

“Lucas would have.”

“Lucas is an idiot.”

Max laughs, suddenly, brightly, as if saying it has reminded her that it’s absolutely true, and Will realizes she’s been weighed down by her sadness all night and that’s why he hadn’t noticed how beautiful she’s become.

“He’d have to be an idiot, to dump you,” he adds, because she needs to know.

“Yeah,” she sighs, smiling at him. “I wish I wasn’t still in love with him.”

Dustin finds them there an hour later, still sitting on the porch, with their third cup of jungle juice between them, laughing way too hard at Will’s description of the ill-fated blowjob he gave New House Guy that one time and how he can’t even think about it without getting nauseous.

“Hi!” Will says, way too drunk to pretend he’s not thrilled to see Dustin. “Are you not going home with that guy?”

“Nah,” Dustin says, sitting down beside them. “Sometimes knowing you could have sex with a stranger is better than doing it. Besides, someone’s gotta take care of you two drunks.”

“Dustin woulda sided with you,” Max tells Will, giggling to herself. “I’m sure of it.”

Will bursts into his own giggles at the thought of sixteen-year-old Dustin telling Mike he was being an asshole for what he did. At the thought of sixteen-year-old Dustin comforting him over the radio when the Demogorgon wouldn’t let him sleep. That would have been nice.

“Oh-kay,” Dustin says. “I think it’s time to get you two home.”

### NOVEMBER

#### 11/13/1989

Dustin leaves his shoes right in front of the door when he gets in, kicking them off instantly. Will’s tripped over them about twenty times by now.

Somehow, he still hasn’t learned to expect it.

Somehow, Dustin still hasn’t started putting them somewhere else.

“Goddamn it,” he grinds out, catching himself against the closet. Fury’s slow to build in Will, but when it does, it’s hot and thick, blinding his brain. He remembers kicking at Fort Byers in the rain like an idiot, a hundred screaming matches with his mom in their tiny Chicago kitchen, how he’d yelled into the bedding for what felt like hours after Mike had left for Hawkins for the last time. It’s taught him that he’s as quick to cool off as he is to heat up, but he doesn’t want heat up at Dustin, he’s been trying to avoid it. He doesn’t want to be that guy who can’t keep his cool enough to live with another person. He doesn’t want to be Lonny.

Dustin’s head snaps up from behind his desk. He’s wearing his reading glasses and he looks guiltier than he had when he’d apologized to Will for keeping a Demodog in his terrarium. “Sorry,” he says.

He looks like he’s been running his hands through his hair again. It’s so much shorter now.

Will breathes in slow. The thick wall of anger blocking the rest of his thought process doesn’t vanish like he was hoping it would.

“I cleared out the bottom of my closet to put my shoes in,” Dustin says. “I swear. I just…forgot.” He looks exhausted.

It’s past eleven, and Dustin’s been studying for this midterm since Will left for his shift at the library seven hours ago.

“Have you even moved since I left?”

“I got mozzarella sticks.”

Will falls back onto his bed. “That’s not a real meal.”

Dustin rustles around at his desk. A moment later, he’s sitting down on the mattress next to Will. “Hi,” he says. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” Will says. “I just…I get really frustrated sometimes.”

“I’m very frustrating. Everyone says so.”

Will makes an impatient noise. “You are not. You’re perfect.”

Dustin grins down at him.

“Except when you leave your shoes in the door.”

“Noted.”

Will sighs.

Unexpectedly, Dustin’s hand runs through his hair. The motion shifts something loose in Will, something shivery and impatient. “You look like you need to get some sleep,” Dustin tells him.

He turns out the light on the way back to his side of the room, lays down in his own bed. “Night, Will,” he says.

Will shimmies out of his jeans and gets under the covers. “Night, Dustin,” he says. “Thanks.”

He’s not angry.

He just still can’t _think_.

It hasn’t been anywhere near long enough. It’s only ten thirty. There are still voices in the hall, and the shimmer of lights under the door. They usually only do this when it’s completely dark, completely silent, as if there were no one else in all of Boston but the two of them.

Will throws the covers aside, anyway, and pushes his boxers down far enough to get a hand around his cock.

The leftover tension he’d been feeling settles low in his belly, an unmistakable heat. On the other side of the room, Dustin’s sheets rustle.

Will strokes himself, once, twice, melting back into his bed. He allows himself to imagine what it would have been like, if he’d really lost his temper. If he’d stalked up to Dustin, pulled him up by the worn-out collar on his shirt and – and kissed him, and kissed him with all the passion his anger had incited.

Fuck, but that’s a train of thought he hasn’t let himself go down before, and it’s so good he can’t help the little noise in the back of his throat.

He freezes instantly, terrified.

Long fingers snake up the side of the bed to grasp at him.

Across the room, Dustin sighs, the slapping noises of his hand growing louder.

God, if Will had kissed him, would he have sighed into Will’s mouth? Would he have kissed back? Will’s seen Dustin kiss people (more than he’d like). Will wonders if he’d rest his hand at the small of Will’s back, like he did with that guy on Halloween. If he’d press Will up against the wall.

He wonders if he could get Dustin to apologize for leaving his shoes out on his knees.

The thought sizzles through Will, makes him throb, makes him leak. He’s never exactly been dominating in bed, but Dustin – this new Dustin he’s met here at college, at least – is so confident, so settled in his own skin, that Will kind of wants to make him crack, make that core of him that only Will knows peek through.

He comes to the thought of Dustin swallowing around his cock.

On the other side of the room, he could swear Dustin whispers “Will” when he comes.

#### 11/23/1989

They take an Amtrak down to New York City, Max riding backwards with Will and Dustin across from her. Will takes the aisle seat. Dustin feels safer near the wall. All of them have coursework spread on the tiny table, and they barely talk the whole way down.

In Rhinecliff, New York, Will has to look up, stretch his arms over his head, even though Dustin pokes the bit of his belly that his shirt rides up over absently, only looking away from his Psych textbook for a moment.

Will catches the glimpse of sunlight in Dustin’s hair and tries to not follow that train of thought. He looks out the window instead.

He swallows thickly at the view.

“What is it?” Dustin asks him a few minutes later, when Will hasn’t been able to tear his eyes away.

Will gestures out the window silently.

“Oh,” Dustin says. “That’s…yeah.” He smiles at Will, and their arms brush together when they both shift to be able to look out the window better, at the riot of color in the trees on the other side of the Hudson, at the little waves on the water, the cold winter sunlight streaming through the clouds.

It’s gorgeous, and Will’s deeply thankful that Dustin’s not ruining that with words.

They reach the city around three, which gives them all of an hour to be ready for Thanksgiving dinner. Billy meets them at Penn Station, scowling into the collar of his leather jacket, and an hour quickly turns into twenty minutes, what with getting subway tickets, finding the right train and getting to the apartment.

“Come _on_ , assholes,” Billy says, more or less urgently, when Dustin points at a pigeon doing a funny walk, successfully distracting Will and Max from keeping up with Billy’s very New York pace.

“Geez, what’s the rush,” Max grumbles.

“Dinner’s at four,” Billy says, and keeps walking.

“I think he just got more charming,” Will mutters.

“This is our chance, though,” Dustin reminds him in an undertone. “We need to take notes.”

“Sure, that won’t be noticeable at Thanksgiving dinner.”

“Afterwards, then.”

“What are you two idiots doing?” Max asks suspiciously.

Will looks at his feet.

“We’re trying to figure out why none of them ever told us we were both going to MIT,” Dustin says, tone low enough to go unnoticed by Billy, who’s still a good six feet ahead of them. “There must be a reason.”

Max looks between them. She doesn’t say anything, but her expression very clearly reads as, _why are you like this_.

“There is a secret and I will get to the bottom of it,” Dustin maintains.

There might be a secret, but Will doubts they will get to the bottom of it over Thanksgiving dinner. The apartment – a two-bedroom with a space in the middle that doubles as kitchen and living room – is ridiculously warm when they get in, turkey roasting in the oven and green beans frying on the stove.

“Fucking Christ, open the window when you’re cooking,” Billy grumbles as soon as they get in, and proceeds to open the narrowest window Will’s ever seen.

“Sorry, Billy,” Steve calls from the kitchen, where he’s chopping something with a dishtowel thrown over his shoulder while Jonathan mans the stove.

“Hey, Wheeler,” Billy shouts, “if you’re not gonna help, you could at least stop the fire department from getting involved.”

Nancy appears from one of the doorways, half of her hair pulled up in some sort of bun and the rest curling around her neck gracefully. She’s wearing a plaid dress and what looks like a cardigan Jonathan inherited from Lonny. “I was barred from the kitchen,” she says. “Sue me for getting some work done.” Noticing Will, Dustin and Max still standing in the doorway, she adds, “Hey guys, how was the trip?”

“Good,” Dustin says. “Amtrak’s good. They should really have more of them, imagine if we had _trains_ in Indiana.”

“I know, right?” Nancy laughs. “Come on, take off your shoes, you can put your stuff on the couch. It would be so much easier to live in Hawkins if you could just take a train to Bloomington.”

“Ooh, Bloomington, thriving metropolis,” Billy sneers, pushing the crud on the couch to the side so they can dump their backpacks.

Will’s really not convinced by Dustin’s stance that he’s a changed man.

At least he doesn’t punch Nancy when she shoves him playfully.

“So,” Nancy says expectantly, plopping down on one of the chairs. “How’s college? Tell me everything.”

“Are you sure we shouldn’t be helping?” Dustin asks.

Billy snorts, and Max looks over to him instantly. She’s been quiet, ever since they met up with him, and Will wonders, not for the first time, if she really wants to be here. “Good luck with helping,” Billy says. “Seriously, nerd, if you can get them to let you in the kitchen, you’re doing better than us.”

Will has to smile at that. Some of his favorite nights in Chicago were when Jonathan still lived there, or when he still came home between semesters, and he and Joyce would get into aggravated fights in the kitchen over who was supposed to be in charge of which pan because they could never keep it straight. It’s nice to see he’s the same here, that he can relax enough to yell at someone like Billy.

It’s strange to see how well he and Steve work together, moving around each other in the tiny kitchen.

“What he said,” Nancy confirms. “So. College?”

“College is good,” Will says when no one else offers up anything. “Midterms were awful.”

“You’re one to talk,” Dustin says, giving him the stink-eye. “Mr. Math here already got all his grades, like, a day after the tests, and they’re all As.”

“Scholarship,” Will points out, not for the first time. “I’d better keep my grades, or you can buy your mozzarella sticks off someone else’s meal plan.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Dustin says. “Serves me right for going into the soft sciences. They grade so slowly.”

“He’s gonna major in Psych,” Will tells Nancy and, he supposes, Billy, proud that Dustin’s sure, now.

Nancy’s smiling widely at them, they must have said something funny inadvertently, because even Billy has a little twitch in his jaw.

“Nerds,” Billy says, but Will can hear the undercurrent of fondness. “Hey, shitbird, what about you? Picked a major yet?”

“ _Bill_ ,” Nancy says disapprovingly, but Max doesn’t seem to mind.

“Nah,” Max says, looking at her fingernails. “I don’t need to till Sophomore year, what’s the rush?”

“Smart choice,” Billy says.

Will is almost sure Max smiles, but he can’t quite see her face.

Steve and Jonathan emerge eventually, sleeves rolled up and skin shining a little with sweat. It really is a tiny apartment for four people, let alone seven. It’s definitely too small for Steve and Dustin’s elaborate handshake routine.

“Oh my god,” Will groans. “I forgot this existed, you guys, this was lame when we were in _middle school_.”

“Ah, he’s just jealous,” Steve says, wrapping Dustin up in a huge bear hug, and then giving Max the same treatment.

Jonathan hugs Will, too, of course, but Jonathan’s not much of a hugger (not like Dustin, or clearly Steve), so it’s less of a bear hug and more of an aardvark hug.

Dinner is a riot of conversations crossing back and forth over the table, _do you remember whens_ and _oh my god, did we tell you abouts_. It’s easy to see the lines demarcating them, the newly minted New Yorkers sharing glances and picking up the threads of each other’s stories while Will and Dustin do the same. It’s only when Will catches sight of Max sneaking off to the fire escape while Dustin, Billy and Nancy clean up that he realizes she might have felt left out.

“You okay?” he asks awkwardly, poking his head through the window.

“I always thought I’d go back to Hawkins for Thanksgiving,” Max says awkwardly, feet dangling off the fire escape. “You know, I thought, um, me and Dustin would take a greyhound together, and Mike and Lucas would be there, and maybe El would be visiting Hopper. I kind of thought it would be—”

“You thought it would be like it was, in high school,” Will guesses, slipping out the window to sit next to her.

“Yeah,” Max says roughly. “I thought – I don’t know. I always used to go to Lucas’s family for the holidays. My mom – Billy’s dad…”

“And now you can’t anymore,” Will says. His heart hurts for her.

“Don’t do that,” she snaps when he reaches out to comfort her. “I just,” she takes a deep, shuddering breath, “I had a really hard time, when we moved from California. I know I pretended I was so cool and all…”

Will chokes on a laugh, because he’d never really thought thirteen-year-old Max was all that cool. Cooler than him, sure. Angry, yeah. Actually cool, not so much.

“It was really hard, moving the first time. And I don’t ever wanna go back to that house, but I thought I could go back to feeling at home somewhere. And I thought Lucas, and Dustin, and Mike and El, and you, when you still talked to us, I thought that would be it. You know?”

“Yeah,” Will says, thinking about how he had felt when Joyce called to say she was working Black Friday and he should really just go hang out with Jonathan in the city for Thanksgiving and they’d see each other at Christmas. “Yeah, I thought I would go home for Thanksgiving too. It’s weird.”

“It scares me,” Max says. “If anything falls through in Boston – if I lose my scholarship, or, I don’t know, if UMass shuts down or something, I’m fucked. I have nothing. I have nowhere to go back.”

“Okay,” Will says, drawing her into an awkward side hug, “first, UMass is not going to just shut down and close the dorms or some shit, why would they. Second, you can always come to me and Dustin, you know that. Third, you’ve got Billy here, and he still scares the shit out of me, but I think he really loves you.”

Max laughs wetly and Will realizes to his horror that she’s crying.

He catches sight of Billy through the window and waves him over frantically.

“Hey, I think you guys should talk,” he says, and flees like a coward. He hopes Billy is better with crying people than he is, although it seems unlikely.

He runs straight into Jonathan, who traps him in his and Nancy’s room for half an hour, calling their mom and pretending they’re all just fine with this new normal of not spending the holidays together.

The phone call wears him a little thin, so when he gets out of Jonathan’s room and collapses onto the couch and Nancy immediately says, “It’s just like old times! If Mike, El and Lucas were here, it’d be all of us,” he snaps.

“Oh yay,” he says. “Fun times. Like all the almost dying. Sure wish Mike were here for more of that.”

He realizes a moment too late that he drew all the entirely too observant eyes in the room onto him. Billy whistles, clearly about to ask a douchey question about Mike.

Dustin changes the subject quickly, and Will tries his best to shut up for the rest of the evening.

It’s only when it’s completely dark in the living room, when Billy and Steve and Nancy and Jonathan have closed their doors and Max’s breathing has evened out in sleep on the couch while Will and Dustin suffer on the air mattress, that he lets himself think about it.

“Mike kissed me,” Will finally says, when staring stubbornly at the ceiling for half an hour doesn’t make the sensation of a tentacle down his throat disappear.

Dustin doesn’t say anything, but he turns, his sleeping bag rustling.

“It was, like, a half a year after we moved? I think? It was around Spring Break,” Will continues. He might as well. “He waited until El was asleep on the couch and then he kissed me in the kitchen.” He swallows heavily. “He told me he couldn’t stop thinking about me. That he missed me.”

Dustin makes a noise, then, but he still doesn’t speak.

“I’m not—” Will turns, too, until he’s facing Dustin in the dark, neither of them looking at each other but at least turned in the right direction if they wanted to. “I’m not telling you this to make you feel sorry for me or anything. I wanted him to be kissing me. I flirted with him first. I never thought he’d do anything. I didn’t even think he noticed.”

“I’ve never felt sorry for you, dingus,” Dustin says.

Suddenly, intensely, Will loves him.

“Anyway,” he says, voice cracking. “It turns out, when your teenage fantasies come true, they suck. I had to tell El Mike had kissed me. He wasn’t going to do it. She dumped him and he went back to Hawkins the next day.” He doesn’t have the words for that last day, Mike haunting their tiny apartment, balefully trailing after El, not even registering Will’s presence.

“That’s why you stopped talking to us.” Dustin picks at the tag on his sleeping bag with a finger. “Because of Mike.”

“Yeah,” Will admits. “I thought – I don’t know what I thought. I was ashamed, I guess. I was so _obvious_ about liking Mike, and him and El were the perfect couple back then, and I ruined it.”

Dustin snorts inelegantly. “Uh, no, sorry. Mike ruined that. Mike’s the fuck-up who kissed someone else. Mike’s the asshole who was stringing you along. Mike didn’t even have the balls to tell his girlfriend himself.”

“You really think so?” Will asks. Sometimes, when it’s light out, when there are no phantom tentacles all over him, he thinks so, too. Sometimes, when El talks to him like nothing happened, he almost believes it.

Dustin reaches out and puts a hand on Will’s arm. He’s probably aiming for a shoulder, but he makes it to an elbow. “I am absolutely certain that Mike is a dick,” he says. “I have several years’ worth of anecdotal proof if you need them.”

Will laughs.

“I should have called you back instead of trying to forget it all happened,” he says, later, but Dustin’s already asleep.

#### 11/30/1989

Will wakes up _wrong_.

“Wha time’s it?” He mumbles against his pillow, eyes still glued shut.

“Five,” Dustin says from somewhere far, far away.

Will groans. He laid down at two, intending to catch a half-hour of sleep and then get back to his problem sets for Calc III. He shouldn’t have stayed out late last night, it was a Wednesday, but his friends from the QSA had been insistent it was Wasted Wednesday and Will should live a little even if Dustin was going to be lame and stay in with his homework.

Even with Dustin staying in, Will had been pretty sure that sitting at his desk, knowing he was missing out on cool shit, was a surefire way to collect yet more nightly visits. Plus, he’d ended up making out with the same sophomore at the last three QSA parties he’d been to. Maybe he’d be there again.

(He had been, and he and Will had exchanged sloppy handjobs under too-bright lights in the bathroom, and the whole thing had actually been pretty underwhelming, and Will had walked back alone in the cold in the middle of the night, Demodogs snapping at his heels.)

He had woken up this morning groggy and unfocussed, with only twelve hours left before he has to hand in this assignment.

“You’re acing the class, anyway,” Dustin had said that morning as he headed off to his psych lab. “You worry too much.”

Will had just groaned.

By two, he had only been halfway through and unable to keep his eyes open. He’d hoped a powernap would get him through it.

Now, it’s three hours later, he has three hours left for the rest of the assignment, and he feels like his brain has been flattened by a semi. His mouth tastes awful and his stomach feels off and he can’t shake the feeling he fell asleep in Boston and woke up in an alternate dimension (except he knows what that feels like and it’s worse). He needs to get up and get back to his desk and finish this, but he can’t stomach the thought of getting out of bed.

“Will?” Dustin asks. “Will, you okay?”

“Yeah,” Will says into his pillow. “I just really need to finish this assignment and I’m not sure I can.”

Dustin pads over to his side of the room and sits down next to Will on the bed. “Would it really be so bad to just hand in what you have so far and take the worse grade?”

“Scholarship,” Will says.

“Right,” Dustin nods. He pauses a moment, and then says, “you know, in my middle school yearbook, it says that you want to draw comics for a living, not solve complex word problems.”

Will laughs. “That was four years ago, Dustin. You wanted to build robots. Now look at you.”

“Fair,” Dustin says. “I’m just worried about you.”

“’S my own fault. Shouldn’t’ve gone out last night.”

“True.”

Will groans.

“Okay,” Dustin says. “Here’s what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna open the window and get some air in here. You’re gonna sit down at your desk and finish the damn problems, because I know you’re not gonna need that long when you actually start thinking about it, and when you’re done, we’ll walk over to Simons together and hand it in.”

“Yes,” Will agrees. “That is what will happen.”

He sits up slowly while Dustin pulls on his sneakers. “I’ll be right back,” Dustin promises, and the door swings shut behind him while Will sits down at his desk.

Dustin was right. When he actually puts his entire brain to the task, the problems aren’t anything new. There’s a reason he got a math scholarship. He can’t believe he was dumb enough to risk it for underwhelming handjobs in a public restroom and a hangover.

Dustin gets back when he’s down to the last three problem sets, opening the door with his elbow. He has a plastic takeaway tray in one hand and a reusable cup in the other.

“Coffee?” Will asks hopefully.

Dustin laughs at him. “No way,” he says. “The last thing you need right now is coffee. I got you peppermint tea and a burger.”

The instant Will starts eating, the queasiness from his nap settles.

“Dustin,” he says around his mouthful. “You are literally the best friend on the planet and I love you.”

Still flushed from outside, Dustin grins. Except – Dustin wasn’t outside, the cup is clearly from the dining hall on the first floor. Maybe he took the stairs. He had to skip the gym this week because of midterms. Either way, the flush suits him.

Will finishes his assignment with forty-five minutes to spare.

“You don’t have to come,” he tells Dustin.

“Nah,” Dustin waves him off. “I could use some fresh air.”

They walk to Simons side by side, Will with his assignment clutched in his hands, Dustin with his hands in his pockets.

On the way back, their shoulders brush together. Neither of them has much to say, but Will enjoys it. His brain is exhausted, beyond functional, and now the adrenaline of finishing the assignment is done, he really just wants to lay back down and go the fuck to sleep.

Clark is waiting in front of their door, though, with his shoes and jacket on.

“It’s Thirsty Thursday at New House,” he says. “You guys wanna come? No, actually, please come with me, Kin won’t and I can’t go alone.”

Will looks to Dustin.

Dustin frowns at him. “Will needs to sleep,” he says.

“He’s not wrong,” Will admits, hoping nothing will come of it and they’ll all just stay home.

“But you could come?” Clark says hopefully.

Will’s stomach plummets.

“I don’t know,” Dustin says. “I…Will, are you gonna be okay?”

“Yeah,” Will lies. “I’ll be fine. What are you going to do, watch me sleep for four hours before it’s a normal-person time to sleep?”

“A good point,” Dustin says. “Clark, I’m all yours.”

They head off back to the elevator together, and Will brushes his teeth and goes to bed.

He’s more exhausted than he’s ever been in his life, but he already knows what will happen when he lies down in an empty, dark, quiet room when his friends are out having fun without him.

“I’m getting really fucking sick of you,” he tells the Demogorgon as it peels off of the ceiling to hover over him.

It opens its mouth wide, all its crazy teeth bared and dripping.

“Leave me alone,” Will tells it.

He closes his eyes tightly and tries to sleep.

It doesn’t leave until Dustin gets back, three hours later, and only when it’s disappeared into ether can Will finally, finally drift off.

### DECEMBER

#### 12/12/1989

_Begin recording_

**Dial tone**

_Steve_ : -- _once bitten and twice shyyy, you keep your distance, but you still catch my eye, tell me baby_ \--

 _Dustin_ : Steve??

 _Steve_ : _LAST CHRISTMAS, I GAVE YOU MY HEART_

 _Dustin_ : Oh my god, Steve, stop.

 _Billy_ : Henderson?

 _Dustin_ : Uh, hi, Billy.

 _Billy (laughing)_ : Sorry about that.

 _Dustin_ : Oh, it’s fine, not like I’ve heard that song every waking moment of my life since Black Friday.

 _Billy_ : Yeah, uh, Harrington lost a bet.

 _Dustin_ : Oh yeah?

 _Billy_ : Yeah, I bet him – uh, I bet him something, and answering the phone like that for a month was forfeit.

 _Dustin_ : Riiiight.

 _Billy_ : What?

 _Dustin_ : Nothing.

 _Billy_ : Henderson.

 _Dustin_ : Look, I know you’re ridiculously in love with him, you might as well call him by his first name.

 _Billy (gruffly)_ : Steve, it’s for you.

 _Steve_ : What’s up, Dustbuster?

 _Dustin_ : Ugh, don’t call me that.

 _Will (whispering)_ : Dustbuster!

 _Dustin (whispering)_ : Shut the fuck up.

 _Steve_ : So, what’s kicking?

 _Dustin_ : How old are you again?

 _Steve_ : No, seriously, why’d you call? I only get five minutes before I have to sing again.

 _Dustin_ : What bet was this you lost?

 _Steve_ : I’ll tell you when you’re older.

 _Dustin_ : …on second thought, please don’t.

 _Steve_ : Attaboy.

 _Dustin_ : I was just wondering…

 _Steve_ : Yeah?

 _Dustin_ : How’d you guys all end up living together, anyway? I mean, you and Billy I get. Jonathan and Nancy I get. But isn’t it awkward, living with your ex?

 _Steve_ : (coughs)

 _Dustin_ : You OK?

 _Steve_ : Yeah. I just wasn’t expecting that.

 _Dustin_ : Oh. You don’t have to answer. I was just curious. You know, ‘cause me and Will living together, the odds are so small. But you guys _chose_ this. I don’t know if we would have, if we’d had the choice.

 _Steve_ : There were really no hard feelings between me and Nance. We weren’t right together. And New York is so expensive, and we’re all kind of broke. It worked out.

 _Dustin_ : Still. I mean, how does Billy feel about it?

 _Steve_ : Um, good. Billy feels good about living with Nancy and Jonathan.

 _Dustin_ : …don’t take this the wrong way, but I can’t imagine Billy feeling good about anything.

 _Steve_ : (laughs) Hey, fuck you. He feels good about _me_. My time’s up, I gotta start singing again—

 _Dustin (hurriedly)_ : Okay, bye.

**Dial tone**

_End recording_

It’s quiet in their room for a while, after he’s hung up.

“Wouldn’t have chosen this, huh?” Will asks eventually.

Dustin swallows heavily. “That was just a ploy to get him to spill.”

“Didn’t help much.”

“I think Steve’s pretty much out as a suspect for engineering this,” Dustin says.

Will nods. “My money’s on Nancy. She’s the most nosy.”

“What if it was two of them?” Dustin asks. “We all know Jonathan will do anything Nancy tells him to. But Steve’s kind of the same with Billy. Look at that damn bet.”

“So you think Nancy and Billy made the decision?”

Dustin shrugs helplessly. “It seems like the most likely scenario. I just don’t know why they’d do it.”

Will sighs. “More research?”

“Definitely.”

Dustin gets up and stretches, the skin of his stomach a sliver of temptation. It’s only when he’s put their super secret sneaky folder in the bottom drawer of his desk and packed his backpack for class that he says, “Hey, Will?”

Will looks up from his problem sets.

“If I had known you were an option, I’d have wanted you to be my roommate.”

#### 12/20/1989

Lucas stops by MIT on his way to his grandma’s in Philly for the holidays. He sleeps on their floor for three nights and acts as if he and Will never even stopped talking.

He’s also packed on what Will guesses to be a solid twenty pounds of muscle, and he eats all the time.

He still won’t go shopping with Dustin to replenish the four bags of chips they had at the start of his visit and no longer have by midday on the third day.

“Aw, man,” he says over lunch in the student lounge, “I am not going snack shopping with Dustin. I left that shit behind me in high school.”

“I resent that,” Dustin tells him, looking honestly put out.

“You have a ranking of _every snack food_ , D. I _do not have the time._ ”

“Dustin,” Will says seriously, “I’ll always go snack shopping with you. I don’t mind when you explain why only the real Nilla wafers are good for the twentieth time.”

Dustin reaches out and lays his hand gently on top of Will’s. “I knew I could count on you. This is why we were meant for each other.”

“Roommates for life,” Will agrees solemnly.

Lucas shakes his head in disgust and goes back to his sandwich. “I can’t believe you’re still salty about the fake Nilla wafers at Will’s fake funeral.”

Will blinks. “There were _fake Nilla wafers_ at _my_ funeral?”

“You had a funeral?” Clark asks, looking between the three of them, confused.

“To be fair, I think your mom was spending all her money on Christmas lights and new phones at the time,” Dustin says.

“To be fair, I think Jonathan organized the whole thing,” Lucas adds.

Will swallows heavily. He’d known, distantly, that there had been some sort of memorial service to the fake body stuffed with cotton (because Jennifer Hayes cried). He knows it was one of the worst times for his family (not the worst, there were too many bad ones to choose from), but he’s never sat down and considered, in detail, what exactly that meant. He imagines Jonathan at sixteen, awkward and angry, calling a funeral home. Going to a grocery store to get food for a wake with whatever pittance he earned at his part-time job because Joyce hadn’t believed, even for an instant, that Will was dead.

God, if it had been Will, he doesn’t know if he’d have had it in him to just forget that ever happened and pretend that Joyce had never asked that of him.

“That’s dark,” Dustin says. His eyes are heavy on Will. His hand is still on Will’s.

“Sorry, who’s Jonathan?” Clark asks.

“Maybe that’s why Jonathan’s all…” Lucas takes a big bite of his sandwich and makes a wiggly motion with the fingers not gripping the rest of it.

“What exactly is Jonathan?” Will asks.

“Creepy.”

“He is _not_ ,” Will begins heatedly, but he catches sight of Dustin’s expression. He looks sheepish, like he’s fourteen with a Demodog living in his terrarium again. “Not you, too,” Will groans.

“I mean, he’s gotten better!” Dustin says. “But there was that whole thing with Nancy, and the pictures…”

“Pictures?”

“What the fuck is even going on,” Clark whispers to himself. “Is this an RPG?”

“Alright,” Dustin says, turning to Clark. “Jonathan’s Will’s older brother. Will went missing in seventh grade, and everyone thought he was dead except Will’s mom, so Jonathan had to do the funeral arrangements. But he also went looking for Will in the woods, and, uh, while he was there, he decided to take creepy naked photos of a girl he could see in someone else’s upstairs window.”

“Wait, _what_?” Will asks, feeling like he’s been doused in cold water.

“Uh, yeah.” Dustin rubs the back of his neck. “You know how Steve went around town spraying _Nancy Wheeler is a slut_ or something everywhere after she and Jonathan started looking for you together?”

“No?!”

“Dude, he was missing,” Lucas says thickly through bread and lettuce.

“Right,” Dustin agrees. Then he blinks several times in quick succession. “Wait, so Jonathan never told you how his camera got broken?”

“No?” Will tries to remember. “He said it was an accident.”

Lucas holds up a finger, swallows, and says, “In that he accidentally took pictures of Nancy and Steve doing it and then Steve accidentally broke his camera? And then Nancy accidentally ditched Steve for Jonathan and Steve and Jonathan accidentally got into a fistfight that got Jonathan arrested?”

“It is kind of a skeevy thing to do,” Dustin says, but he’s quick to add, “Steve and he totally made up, though, I mean they all live together now even though Nancy cheated on Steve with Jonathan, so they must have gotten over the thing with the pictures.”

Will rests his forehead on the table. “Jonathan,” he moans. “Why?”

“It was a very traumatic time for us all,” Dustin says, patting his head gently.

Next to him, Clark leans forward. “Wait, so you two knew each other before MIT?”

“Yeah, of course,” Will says into the table. “When I still lived in Hawkins we were all in a D & D group.”

“We were a _party_ ,” Lucas corrects.

“I didn’t know you were from Hawkins,” Clark says.

Will looks up at him.

Clark goes back to his salad.

“Man, those were the times,” Lucas says, apparently mostly to himself. “I wish Mike were here, to really round us out.”

Will has to look away, can’t stop the bitterness from crossing his face.

Dustin catches his eye from across the table and, steady as he always is, holds it.

#### 12/21/1989

It’s the worst idea. They’re roommates. Will’s not going to be able to look Dustin in the eye, not after this, not after –

He arches on a moan, back cracking with the suddenness of the movement. “Just like that,” he says though clenched teeth, “Jesus, _yes_ , Dustin.”

He used to be quiet in bed.

Dustin rumbles a pleased sound out against Will’s neck, where his mouth is currently drawing a hot line up to Will’s ear. Will gets a hand tangled into his hair, keeps his mouth just there, worrying at a patch of skin making starbursts fire along his nerves.

“I like when you pull my hair,” Dustin says when he pulls away. His voice has a note of gravel in it Will’s never heard before. His eyes are dark. The whole room’s dark, but Will doesn’t think he’s kidding himself into believing that Dustin’s looking at him like he wants to wreck him.

He tugs at Dustin’s hair again, a little harder, because he can. Dustin’s eyes slide shut. “What else do you like?” Will asks.

Dustin kisses him slowly. Will didn’t even really know you could kiss like this until Dustin pressed him back against the door of their dorm room as soon as they’d come back from bringing Lucas to the train station, hands brushing against each other seemingly on accident for the entire trip, and kissed him like he never wanted to do anything else ever again. He kisses back, helpless to do anything but chase after Dustin’s mouth.

“I like that,” Dustin says. “I like it when you make noise. I’d really like to suck you off.” It’s almost conversational, the way Dustin lists off his favorite breakfast cereals in order of preference at least twice a month because he forgets they’ve had that conversation before. Will _doesn’t understand_ how it’s sending deep thrills to the pit of his stomach that Dustin also has a list of things he’d like to do to Will.

Dustin’s mouth reconnects to his neck and Will’s helpless to do anything but squirm against Dustin where he’s got Will trapped against the door, gasp out, “I’d like that, too.”

Will moans like it’s been punched out of him when that’s all it takes for Dustin to slide to his knees, to nose at the fly of Will’s jeans.

“You’re sure about this?” Dustin asks. He’s looking up at Will, gaze intent. It shakes something hot and almost angry loose in Will, wild enough for him to forget every single second thought about them being roommates and friends and ruining all of that for this.

“Yeah,” he gets out. “I want. I want you. Are you sure?”

In answer, Dustin unzips the fly of Will’s pants with his teeth.

Dustin’s tongue is hot and wet on Will’s overheated skin, a blunt instrument on the mess that his central nervous system was since the moment Dustin’s thigh pressed tight against his on the shitty plastic seats on the red line.

“God,” Will groans out, unable to keep quiet. _I like when you make noise_. “I’ve wanted you so bad, Dustin. Every time I heard you jerk off with me,” he inhales shakily as Dustin uses just the tip of his tongue to trace around the head, “every damn time I wanted to get out of my bed and just—just touch you.”

Dustin takes him deeper, laving broad strokes under the head with his tongue as he strokes the base in the tight ring of thumb and forefinger. Will clutches at the door behind him, joints burning, liquefying under the assault. “I wanted to be the one you were fucking every time you brought someone to this room,” he confesses, punch-drunk on the feel of Dustin’s soft lips, on the brand of his tongue. “I was so jealous I couldn’t even—

He pauses in a drawn-out moan.

“Couldn’t even pretend I wasn’t thinking about being the person you do this to,” he finishes breathlessly. “Knew you’d be so much _better_ than anyone else.”

Dustin pulls off then, breathless and hoarse. “Yeah?” He asks. “Am I better? Am I better than every single one of those fucking assholes you let paw at you at every damn party, Will? ‘M I gonna make you feel better, gonna make you come harder?” He sucks, hard, at the head of Will’s cock.

Will’s eyes screw closed of their own accord.

“Don’t know,” he says, when he’s got his breath back. “I guess we’ll see.”

Dustin rocks back onto his heels, uses Will’s thigh to steady himself as he gets up again. “You little shit,” he says, but it sounds kind of like an endearment, with the way he breathes it against Will’s ear just before dragging him into another deep kiss. Will’s head knocks back against the door. He worms his hand between them, fumbles with Dustin’s goddamn button-fly until it’s all the way loose, until he can cop a feel like he’s been wanting to since he heard Dustin come for the first time.

Dustin throbs against his fingers through his boxers.

He pulls back for the first time since they’d gotten back to the room. The rush of cool air against Will’s body makes him suck in a deep breath, goosebumps breaking out along his bare arms.

Dustin pulls his t-shirt off over his head and turns his back, headed towards his bed. “C’mon,” he says over his shoulder.

Will follows, shedding his own clothes as he does. He follows right up to Dustin, rummaging in his nightstand, lets his momentum bowl them both over into the sheets, catches Dustin’s surprised laugh with his mouth and luxuriates in all of their skin pressed together.

He’s never had this, not with his boyfriend in high school and not with a casual hookup, the time and opportunity to get fully naked, to feel what it’s like when all of his partner is bare for him, with him. Dustin’s heavy, this close, the density of muscle under his skin harder to ignore than usual. His thighs box Will’s in, his arms pin Will down. His face is so familiar and so kind that Will’s heart doesn’t even think to pound with fear like it did the one time his ex had pressed him down into his bed.

“So,” Dustin says against Will’s clavicle, once they’ve explored the sensation of rocking against each other, slippery with sweat and ungainly on the single bed, “I have an idea.”

“Am I gonna like it?” Will asks, almost coy.

Dustin nips at his nipple in punishment. Will groans.

“Let’s see,” Dustin says. He grabs his lube off the nightstand, turns Will onto his side and slips in behind him. There’s the snick of the cap, the squelch of the liquid inside, and then Dustin’s pressing gently into the space between Will’s thighs. “Yeah?” Dustin asks, low against Will’s ear.

The goosebumps make a comeback, prickling all down Will’s side. When Dustin’s lube-wet hand snakes around to pull at his cock, Will throws his head back against Dustin’s shoulder. “Yeah,” Will says.

It’s a sentiment he repeats, again and again, increasingly incoherent, the sensation of Dustin’s thick cock between his thighs, rubbing up against the sensitive skin of his inner thighs, the hotspot behind his balls, Dustin’s square-tipped, firm fingers pulling at him, too much to be contained.

“You feel _so good_ ,” Will moans out while Dustin worries at the side of his neck with his teeth.

A drop of precome slides out the tip of Dustin’s dick where it’s pushing between Will’s thighs.

“You were right,” Dustin says, so low Will nearly doesn’t hear him. “This is better than anyone else.”

Will’s cock twitches in his grip.

“Yeah,” Dustin encourages, “that’s it, Will, come for me. God, you’re so fucking hot, it’s ridiculous. C’mon, let go for me, let me make you feel good, let me make you feel as good as you make me feel.”

Will lets the words wash over him, warm him all over, set the pit of his stomach tightening as Dustin strokes his foreskin over the head and back, and over and back, and over and back until Will’s crying out into the pillow and coming hot and wet in Dustin’s hand, on his comforter, on his own stomach.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Dustin groans with feeling, spattering come between Will’s thighs.

When Will wakes up, Dustin is snuggled up behind him, arm rested casually on Will’s hip. Will has crease marks from the pillow imprinted on his cheeks, sand in his eyes, a twinge in his hip, and he realizes he has two hours until he has to be at the airport to fly home for winter break.

### INTERLUDE: WINTER BREAK

**Dial tone**

_Will_ : Hello?

 _Dustin_ : Hi. It’s me. I just have to say something.

 _Will_ : Uh, okay.

 _Dustin_ : I’m sorry I stopped trying to reach you, when you moved to Chicago.

 _Will_ : Why are you sorry? I stopped answering. It’s my fault.

 _Dustin_ : Being friends is hard long-distance. I read up on it a lot, that summer, and when you moved, and I figured out it would be a lot of work, so I shouldn’t have given up so easy.

 _Will_ : I should have put in the work, Dustin. You did all of it, I should have put more in.

 _Dustin_ : I just wanna say, I’m not gonna give up so easy this time. You’re stuck with me for good, motherfucker.

 _Will_ : (laughs)

 _Dustin_ : Anyway, um. Merry Christmas, Will.

 _Will_ : Happy Hanukkah.

**Dial tone**

### JANUARY

#### 01/26/1990

Will barely sleeps the night before he heads back to MIT for the Spring semester. His mom laughs at him, ruffling his hair.

“You’re excited to be heading back, huh?” She asks.

He smiles bashfully, and tries very hard not to think about Dustin, and having sex with Dustin.

“I hope you’ll miss me a little bit,” she says, holding up her fingers to indicate how small a bit he can miss her.

He wraps her up in a hug barely big enough to encompass how much he missed her last semester. “You know I’ll be back in the summer, right?” He asks.

“Oh, yeah,” she says. “That’s what they all say. But Jonathan’s got his internship lined up already, and who even knows when El will get back.”

“I’ll be back,” Will promises. “Who else would make me surprise casserole?”

She bats at his arm playfully.

His heart’s not exactly light when he gets on the plane, but it’s not as heavy as it was when he left home the last time.

He gets in before Dustin. He was always going to get in before Dustin. Dustin has never been early to anything in his life. The problem is that it leaves Will too much time to think and prepare. He changes his shirt three times. Then, he decides he should really have a second shower.

While he’s in the shower, he drifts off briefly into a fantasy of what he wishes would happen when Dustin gets here – Dustin comes straight to their room, Dustin has eyes only for him, Dustin wants him right away – and it’s so gratifying that Will’s lizard brain talks him into taking the showerhead off the wall and spending a nerve-wracking ten minutes painstakingly cleaning out a very intimate part of his body.

He’s done this part before, when his mom was out, based entirely on a pamphlet she had given him after dinner three days before that he had absolutely refused to talk to her about. He’s never actually done the bits that come after – the bits that involve another human being – and he feels kind of weird and shaky when he’s done in the shower. He tries to imagine actually going through with it – having anal sex with Dustin – and almost goes back for a third shower. He’s only hindered by the knowledge that his suitemates have definitely, definitely noticed him showering twice already.

Dustin gets in a half hour later, after the party suite down the hall has already started blasting C&C Music Factory so loud the bass makes Will’s bedframe vibrate.

“Hi,” he says. He’s standing in the doorway with his ridiculously full suitcase and his even stupider hat that his mom knitted, that makes his cheeks look even rosier and his eyes even brighter than they do anyway.

“Hi,” Will says.

“How was your break?” Dustin asks, pulling his suitcase into the room and letting the door swing shut behind him.

Will shrugs. “You know. Slept a lot. Fine. Yours?”

“Same. Steve and Billy say hi.”

“Cool.”

The mattress by Will’s side dips.

Without the hat, Dustin’s hair is a mess. “Missed you.”

“You too.”

Will’s not always a talkative person, and he’s been more than happy to let Dustin fill those spaces or just be quiet with him in the last months. It’s never felt this awkward.

Dustin gets up eventually, walks back to his side of the room like that was his plan all along. He bends down to unzip his suitcase and Will—

Will realizes that he can’t accept nothing happening, not tonight. He gets up, follows Dustin across the room, pulls him up by the shoulder.

“Hi,” he says, and kisses Dustin.

Dustin more or less melts into his arms.

It short-circuits Will into a repeating program of motion, running his hands up and down Dustin’s spine, untucking his shirt, cupping the base of his skull to tilt his head just so. Dustin groans when Will tugs at his hair. Will shivers when Dustin’s hand slips up under his shirt.

His knees do something unfortunate when Dustin scrapes his teeth down the side of Will’s neck, and he has to push Dustin towards his bed before he loses the ability to stand altogether. Once there, though, he realizes he can blanket Dustin with his whole body, can kiss him until they’re both dizzy and panting against each other, can feel every inch of Dustin under him. On autopilot, he nudges their hips together, groaning at how good it feels to rub against Dustin even through both their jeans.

“Wait, no,” Dustin says, loud in the hushed space between them (quiet in contrast to the pounding music Will can hear through the hall).

Will pulls back as if burned, sure that Dustin’s going to call it off and they’ll be awkward roommates for another four months and then never speak to each other again.

“I wanna try something,” Dustin says instead of _I’m sorry, I can’t do this_ like Will had expected.

Will settles back onto his haunches, so he’s only sitting on Dustin’s hips, not blanketing his entire body. He feels powerful in that moment, like he’s the predator for once, not the helpless, consumed prey. He rocks back, feels the gratifying swell of Dustin’s erection against his ass. Dustin groans, wordless, and Will licks his lips. There’s just something about making someone as verbal as Dustin so animal that really does it for him.

“Okay, okay,” Dustin says through gritted teeth, “take your pants off.”

Reluctantly, Will obeys, swinging his leg over Dustin’s side to shimmy out of his jeans and boxers. Dustin watches, appreciative, hands clasped together under his head. His arms are on particular display and Will can’t quite help himself running fingers across them to feel the firmness of muscle he’d watched for so long before he got to touch.

Dustin allows the touch for a moment, but then he reaches up to catch Will’s hands. “Hey, no getting distracted,” he says. “I want you to sit on my face.”

Will pauses.

“I mean, if that’s okay with you!” Dustin adds quickly. “I just…uh.”

“You just want to?” Will asks.

“Yeah,” Dustin says, a little too fast, cheeks a little too pink. “I _really, really_ want to.”

Will swallows around the dryness in his throat. “Okay,” he says. “Good thing I showered.” He makes no move to change their position, struck immobile by his own shyness.

Dustin’s hands are hot brands on his hips, nudging him up and around, till his ass is pushed up right against the bridge of Dustin’s nose. Will’s never been this bright red, this ashamed, but there’s still a low thrum in the pit of his stomach, excited. He rocks up onto his knees so he doesn’t break Dustin’s nose or something, pulls off his T-shirt for good measure so he feels a little less ridiculous, and then Dustin’s already on him.

It’s wet and warm and it tickles like fuck at first. Will flinches away. Dustin makes a questioning noise.

Will breathes in and out deeply. “It’s okay,” he says, “try again.”

He settles back down slowly, in increments, trying to consciously relax, to accept the soft-wet-bright-sparking feel of Dustin’s tongue against nerve endings that have had, at most, someone’s fumbling fingers rubbing against them through a layer of cotton. His thighs shake, balancing himself while trying not to crush Dustin beneath him, trying to keep some parts relaxed and some tense.

Dustin’s hands snake around his thighs and pull Will down tight against his face. For a second, Will thinks he’ll overbalance, but then he’s tight to Dustin’s face and loose all over where Dustin’s licking into him, gentle but determined and setting arousal at a low flame in the pit of Will’s stomach.

“Oh,” Will says, shocked.

He’s unsure at first, if he likes it or not, but fuck, the noises Dustin makes. The way his hand is clutched tight around Will’s thigh, white-knuckled. The way he keeps nosing in, as if he could possibly get deeper into Will’s ass if he tried.

Dustin’s tongue slides, and suddenly it’s not at the rim of Will’s ass anymore, it’s poking just ever-so-slightly in, and Will moans.

Dustin redoubles his efforts, tongue fucking in and in and into Will. Will slides a hand into Dustin’s hair, clenching too tight, but that just makes Dustin make a noise against Will, vibrating against his balls, and Will is so hard his dick can’t even stand up under the weight, heavy with blood and pulsing in time to the flicks of Dustin’s tongue.

He reaches for it on instinct, too turned-on to think with his upstairs brain, but Dustin pulls away long enough to gasp out, “Yeah, touch yourself for me, fuck that’s hot.”

Will can’t see behind himself to look at the rest of Dustin’s body, but he can hear the rasp of skin on fabric, guesses Dustin’s touching himself through his jeans, and the thought that doing this to Will, getting his tongue all over the most intimate part of Will’s skin, is doing it for Dustin so much he has to touch himself makes a drop of precome well up at the tip of Will’s dick.

“Fuck, Dustin,” he groans, rocking back against Dustin’s tongue.

Suddenly, there’s blunt pressure at his ass. “This okay?” Dustin asks, and Will agrees before he’s even fully registered that that’s one of Dustin’s fingers, pushing in next to his tongue, sloppy-wet with spit.

If he weren’t so turned on, he’d be terrified that he didn’t take that third shower, but he is so turned on that all his worries, all his second thoughts, are on a back burner somewhere, boiling over unnoticed. Instead, all of Will’s body is focused on that one pinprick of sensation, Dustin’s thick finger exploring inside him, stretching the walls of his ass, crooking up against the inside. The drag of it burns, spit drying too quickly, but Dustin’s tongue’s still there, he’s still mouthing wetly against Will’s perineum, against the place where Dustin’s finger and the inside of Will’s body meet.

Dustin pulls his finger out a bit and Will makes a noise in displeasure.

“Is it bad?” Dustin asks immediately, muffled by Will’s thighs. “Do you need me to stop?”

“I need you to put it back in,” Will says, and sees Dustin’s eyes clench shut between his legs against a wave of what can only be arousal.

Dustin fucks his finger back in and Will groans.

He’s been rubbing his dick lazily, just drawing little circles around the head, drawing it out, but when Dustin starts pushing his finger in and out with purpose, getting it wet each time his tongue gets near it, he can’t help himself, fucking into his fist and back onto Dustin, riding his finger, riding his face.

He probably looks like an idiot, and it’s lucky the closet door is wide open and Will can’t see himself in the mirror on the front, but it feels too good to stop.

Dustin crooks his finger just a bit and hits what he had been only grazing before and Will’s mouth drops open.

“Again,” he says, voice gone higher and tighter than he’d like.

Dustin does it again.

“Fuck, Dustin, gonna come,” Will gets out, stripping his cock frantically as he chases the sensation Dustin just caused, needing it again and again.

He thinks Dustin moans, or agrees, or something, but it’s hard to tell with his tongue working double time and his mouth right up against the skin of Will’s ass, his finger rubbing over and over and over just the right spot.

Will comes in his fist moments later, with a high little noise caught at the back of his throat. Come drips down his fist onto Dustin’s face and Will feels hazily like he should be ashamed, but he feels too blissed out, cotton wool packed tight in his skull where his brain is supposed to go.

Dustin makes a noise against Will’s thigh that might actually be criminal, and when Will finally manages to lever himself off Dustin’s face and look down at him, he gets to see Dustin’s hips jerking up as he comes, untouched, in his jeans, reaching down immediately to massage himself through the orgasm.

“Just from that?” Will asks, awed.

“Fuck, Will,” Dustin breathes. “I’ve been dreaming about that for months, that was so _good_ , got your fucking come all over me, you were so fucking hot…” he trails off into a wordless noise of pleasure as the last of it squirts out of him, white pearling through the fabric of his jeans. He shudders while he comes down.

Will’s cock twitches painfully against his thigh.

He bends himself in two to kiss the breath out of Dustin, because that was – that was something.

“Fuck,” Dustin says with feeling when they pull apart.

“You taste like ass,” Will tells him, and they both laugh.

They sit like that for a while, Dustin splayed out on the bed, Will sitting beside him, just catching their breath and recovering from whatever that was. Eventually, Dustin groans and sits up, grimacing as the come on his face and probably also in his pants dries. “Do we have any wet wipes or something?” He asks. “I don’t wanna go shower like this.”

He has a point, Christie would probably never let them hear the end of it.

Will gets up and rummages in his desk until he finds a pack of tissues, and Dustin rubs at the grossest bits until he’s presentable enough to hold a towel in front of his crotch and run for the bathroom.

With nothing better left to do, Will settles in his own bed and hopes Dustin will join him when he gets back from the shower, but he falls asleep before he can ask.

#### 01/27/1990

“So,” Clark says pleasantly over lunch the day after they get back. “Were you ever going to tell me you were the missing kid from Hawkins?”

“Um, no,” Will says. “I keep hoping that will just…go away if I don’t mention it.”

In the shadowy corner by the back entrance of the cafeteria, Barbara Holland’s corpse mocks him for that.

“Does that mean I can’t ask questions about it?” Clark has his mouth full of runny mashed potatoes, but it doesn’t seem to bother him.

“I don’t know. What questions?”

“Were you really lost in the woods?”

Will snorts out his milk accidentally. He had forgotten that was the official government cover-up. No wonder his mom doesn’t trust state employees whose names don’t rhyme with Bim Bopper. “Uh, yeah,” he says. “Lotsa woods in that part of the country. It’s a real danger to unaccompanied minors.”

“Right,” Clark says.

They eat in silence for a while. Or, well, Clark eats. Will pushes his food around on his plate while Barbara’s corpse blinks in and out of his sightline in various states of decomposition.

“Are you mad at me?” Will asks eventually.

Clark looks up. “No, sorry. I just—”

Will cocks his head to the side in question.

“I was so jealous of you,” Clark says. “You and Dustin, it was like you had the college thing figured out immediately. You had in-jokes after knowing each other for like an hour. You helped Dustin pick a major. He did this thing where he asked around to make sure everyone in the suite was cool with gay guys so you’d feel comfortable. It made me feel like I was really bad at making friends.”

“Oh.” Will blinks. On the list of things he imagined Clark might be annoyed about – Will lying about his past by omission, Will participating in a patently obvious government cover-up, Will fucking his roommate and potentially destroying the harmony of their suite, not that Clark knew about that – that hadn’t even made it onto the top ten. Actually, Will hadn’t even considered it as a factor. “I. Um.”

Clark shakes his head, waving off Will’s attempts to answer. “No, I know, it’s weird. I just…I was so relieved to hear that you guys have always known each other. It’s like I didn’t fuck up the whole college thing. I just don’t get why you didn’t tell us.”

Will sighs. “A lot of messed up things happened in Hawkins,” he says. “And I can’t really talk about any of them. But my family moved before the beginning of high school, and I just kind of lost touch with everyone.” Kind of. Kind of instantaneously, six months after leaving. Kind of on purpose. “I wanted to stop being the kid who went missing in the woods, you know? And I liked that, and I didn’t want to keep being that kid, here. Dustin was actually just…following my lead.”

“I get that,” Clark says. He looks less confused, now, and he’s finally done with his potatoes. “I don’t want to bring up bad memories or anything—”

“No, you’re fine,” Will tells him.

“Thanks for telling me.”

Will smiles at him. “It’s okay. And also, I was really proud of myself that I managed to make friends with you the first week here. That stuff’s not easy for me, either.”

Clark grins at him, then.

Will breathes a bit easier. Barbara retreats.

“So, like, Dustin just agreed to pretend you hadn’t met before? No questions asked? On day one?”

“We didn’t really talk about it,” Will admits.

Clark shakes his head. “Man, he really would do anything for you.”

#### 01/28/1990

Neither of them really cares about football. The lounge only has the one TV, though, and Chris-the-RA made them hot wings for the Superbowl. Everyone’s going, even Kin, who seems to think he’ll learn something important about American culture.

It’s cramped when everyone’s settled down for the first quarter. Christie’s wearing a 49ers sweatshirt and she’s really intense about it. Will tries to get a seat on the opposite side of the lounge, but he realizes too late that leaves him pressed tightly against Dustin on the one remaining space on half a comfy chair.

They haven’t talked about anything besides when next to get food since they went to bed, the first night Dustin got back.

This morning, Will jerked off in the shower and spent all day in the library, working (pointless and boring, given the semester hasn’t even started yet).

Sitting so close to Dustin their thighs are pressed together isn’t helping.

Will makes it to the halftime show before he realizes that he doesn’t understand football and he doesn’t care about the display of Louisiana state pride currently on air. He slips a hand onto Dustin’s knee, says into his ear, “I’m going to go back to our room, wanna come?”

He slides his hand a little higher on Dustin’s leg, just to make a point, and then gets up and claims something vague about being tired and heads back to their room.

Dustin is only two minutes behind him.

Will is on him as soon as they’re through the door.

“Okay, okay, no, stop,” Dustin says against his mouth, “no, we can’t -- _Will_!”

Will pulls away reluctantly from where he’d tackled Dustin to his bed.

“Sorry,” Will says. “Sorry – do you – “

But Dustin’s not looking at him anymore. Dustin’s looking behind him.

“Will,” he says. “The Demogorgon—he’s here.”

“He’s not _real_ ,” Will says, impatient. “He’s just in my head.”

“Then why can I _see him_?”

Will turns around to his most frequent nightmare.

“Fuck,” he says.

-

El picks up the phone on the first ring.

The thing is a brick, Will saw it when she loaded up the car for her impromptu road trip, begun just days before Will headed off to MIT. It cost way too much and it was Joyce’s one condition on El being allowed to leave on her own. Politely, none of them mentioned that El was eighteen and could do whatever she wanted.

“Will,” she laughs into the line when he says hi. “I thought you’d never call me.”

“Did you want me to?” He asks.

“Of course I did. You’re my brother, sort of.”

“Sort of,” Will echoes. He had thought ‘sort of’ eclipsed ‘brother’. Maybe he’d been wrong, it hadn’t been the first time.

“So, tell me about college,” she says.

“I’m sorry,” he blurts out.

“What for?”

“For Mike, and for not calling, and for calling now.”

There’s a long pause, and then she says, “What happened, Will? I can be at your dorm in half an hour.”

“Please,” he answers.

She turns up in the beat-up car she inherited from Jonathan. That’s five dollars Will owes Jonathan. He had bet the car would die on her in October at the latest. Jonathan had bet on it lasting the year.

Max is in the passenger seat.

It seems like a waste of time, but they all hug each other hello. Dustin and Will get their arms crossed over, trying to switch partners halfway through. Will mourns the sudden awkwardness of physical contact with Dustin. He knew it was too good to be true.

“You were visiting Max?” Dustin asks. “Why didn’t you let us know?”

El’s eyes dart over towards Will. “I wasn’t sure I was welcome.”

Will stuffs his hands deeper into the belly pocket of his sweatshirt.

The common room between their dorms is empty. Christie and Sue’s door is leaned open, but they’re still at the Superbowl viewing. Will, Dustin, El and Max filter into Will and Dustin’s room as fast as they can.

Dustin locks the door behind him and then checks all the corners.

He unscrewed the lightbulbs while they were waiting for El to get here.

“The Demogorgon’s back,” he says, sitting heavily on his bed. El has claimed Will’s bed. Max is on Will’s desk chair. Will’s leaning back against the closet door, knees drawn up, arms around them.

In the first moment, neither Max nor El say anything at all.

The worst thing that’s happened since ’85 is Reagan’s second term.

“Where?” El asks eventually, when neither Will nor Dustin adds anything.

“Here,” Dustin says. “It was leaning over Will’s shoulder like—like—I don’t even know, it was horrifying.”

Will snorts.

Dustin glares at him.

 _Well, fucked that up,_ he thinks to himself, and the Demogorgon’s goddamn fingers slide out the closet to lay heavily on his shoulder.

Max jerks in the chair, clamping both hands over her mouth to not scream and banging her knee on the desk.

Will takes a deep breath, closing his eyes. “Go away,” he begs the Demogorgon. “Just stop already, no one wants you here.”

The Demogorgon’s hand pulls back slowly, lingeringly, its creepily long fingernails drumming against the closet door one by one as it vanishes back into darkness.

“What,” Max hisses, “the fuck.”

Dustin nods energetically, face ashen.

El is just looking at Will evenly.

Will’s never been able to lie to her, not really, he’s always felt too guilty.

He’s never going to stop owing El. She sacrificed herself to save his life before he even met her. He repaid her with jealousy and unkindness.

“This isn’t new, is it?” She asks.

He shakes his head.

“How long has he been with you?”

Will shrugs. “Since it happened?”

“Son of a bitch.”

Dustin says _son of a bitch_ roughly twenty times a day, because he stubbed his toe or doesn’t want to go to an early class or the cereal dispenser is out of cinnamon toast crunch. Will is going to have to go back to being a freak with regular hospital appointments to deal with all the bullshit dogging his footsteps, and he won’t get to hear it anymore.

Will rests his forehead on his knees and hopes he can stop crying in time to look up again.

He’s not expecting El’s little hand on his shoulder or the brush of her coconut-scented hair against his cheek as she hugs him.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” She asks.

“I thought it was all in my head,” Will tells her, voice muffled against his jeans. “I thought it was just…PTSD or something. No one’s been able to see him before.”

“When does he show up?” El asks, rubbing her warm hand against his back.

“When I’m alone, mostly. And scared. Anxious.” He sniffs, swallows, trying to get the worst of the clog out of his voice. “I really thought I just had some sort of disorder and that was how my brain decided to show it.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Dustin asks, and oh, he’s on Will’s other side, pulling Will into a hug, that’s nice, maybe Will can still salvage their friendship if nothing else.

Will hugs him back briefly, hard, trying to draw in some of Dustin’s strength.

“I just wanted to be normal,” he says. It’s a dumb excuse and he’s been using it since he was a fourteen-year-old asshole. “I’m sorry. I should have—gotten help earlier or something. Not come to college if I was going to put people in danger.” God, what if the Demogorgon will follow him wherever he goes? What if he has to live alone in the woods like Hopper?

“That’s bullshit,” Max says. “What are you gonna do, let the Demogorgon hold you hostage for the rest of your life?”

The closet door behind Will rattles uncomfortably at the thought. Dustin, Will and El press their backs against it until it falls silent.

“I don’t think it’s really here,” El says, even as she grimaces against a phantom kick from the inside of the closet.

Dustin looks over at her incredulously, then slams his back and his head against the door when it rattles again.

“Has Dustin seen it before?” El asks.

“NO!” Dustin yells. “I would have said something!”

“It doesn’t usually show up when Dustin’s here,” Will mumbles. “Only when he’s asleep, or gone, or something. It’s mostly just – flashes.” He thinks of Barbara in the cafeteria and wonders if anyone else saw her. She’d been at weird angles, hidden between two glass doors or in the dark corner by the service entrance, and she’d only ever been there for split seconds. Will only knew to look for her because he was used to it.

“Hold up, hold up,” Dustin says. “The Demogorgon has _been in our room while I was asleep_?”

“It’s not real,” El says.

Will wants to believe her.

“I know what it feels like, remember?” She says. “I killed it once. Sort of. This bit is still alive, but it’s not – it’s not going to hurt us, or it would have hurt Will before now.”

“I don’t know if that’s true,” Will admits. “It’s never been this bad before.”

“There have never been four people who believe in it looking straight at it,” El says. “I think that’s giving it power.”

“So I shouldn’t have called Billy before we came here and told him to get Jonathan here?” Max’s expression isn’t so much guilty as defiant, and Will wants to groan.

She tries calling again on their phone, but no one’s picking up at Jonathan’s apartment.

“What now?” Will asks.

El sighs. “I guess you can’t make a sensory deprivation tank anywhere around here?”

Will thinks of the bathtub in their shared bathroom. The drain has been clogged with Kin’s hair since November, and no one else is cleaning it out for him. “I really don’t think you want that,” he says.

She frowns. “I’m not too good at accessing stuff without that anymore.”

Will knows she tried, for months, after Starcourt, reaching and reaching for a power that had left her. He was there, right next to her, cross-legged on her narrow bed in Chicago, while they tried to Force-call Mike back in Hawkins.

“Maybe I should go away,” he says. “It’s me it keeps coming back to. If I just – stay out of the way – “

“No way,” Dustin says instantly. “I’m not leaving you alone to deal with this. That’s – you _just said_ it almost never happened when I was there.”

Will nearly chokes on his guilt. He wishes Dustin was less of a good person.

El’s still frowning. “I agree,” she says. “You always do that.”

“What?” Will asks, caught off guard.

“That,” she says, making a vague gesture. “Go off on your own instead of talking to people. Act like stuff is your fault. I don’t think it helps.”

Will’s momentarily struck dumb.

“You don’t blame him for Mike!” Dustin’s pointing a finger at her, looking triumphant. “I knew it.”

“Michael made his own mistakes,” El sniffs.

“That’s what I said!” Max and Dustin chorus.

It chokes a laugh out of Will.

“Seriously?” He asks El. “I thought—”

El grabs him by the elbow, cuddles up to him. “You’re my brother, sort of. I was hurt and I didn’t know how to deal with it, but I wasn’t hurt by you. You told me the truth. Friends—”

“Friends don’t lie,” Dustin finishes imperiously.

“But I did lie,” Will says, frustrated that they all seem to want to forgive him and not hold him accountable for all his many fuck-ups. “I lied about the Demogorgon for years, and I didn’t even know—”

“You lied about how you were feeling,” Dustin says. “You pretended to be happier than you were. The only person you hurt was yourself. And don’t get me wrong, that’s dumb as shit and it pisses me the fuck off, but your heart’s still in the right place.”

Will closes his eyes. He doesn’t know what else to do or say anymore.

El’s still holding his left arm. Dustin’s hand is resting over his right hand.

“Guys,” Max says eventually, “do you think we should call Lucas and Mike?”

The radio is dusty when Dustin gets it out from the bottom of one of the plastic storage tubs under his bed.

“Tell me that thing hasn’t been on the entire time we’ve been living here,” Will says with no small amount of horror. God, if Mike Wheeler heard him getting the rimjob of his life the day before yesterday he might as well burst into flames and die.

“Just receiving, not sending,” Dustin says, still on his knees by the bed, fiddling with the dials. “And it’s on super low. I didn’t want to…” he looks over at Will shiftily, and Will knows what he didn’t want to. “I couldn’t turn it off,” Dustin adds hoarsely. “Just in case.”

Dustin feels safer near the wall.

Dustin dreams that he got Steve killed sometimes.

“I get that,” Will says.

The radio crackles to life slowly. “Battery’s pretty weak,” Dustin says. “Let’s hope either of them still has their radios. El, how’s your mojo? Can you give me a boost? I don’t have Mike’s number and if the phones are still being tapped, I’d rather do this.”

El nods, screws up her nose and shuts her eyes tight, concentrating.

Dustin presses the button and says, “Lucas? Mike? This is Dustin, do you copy?”

There’s no response for a moment, so he adds, “This is a code red, guys. Code red.”

He sets the radio on his bed and slides down to sit on the floor, facing Will.

“We could call Lucas,” Will says. “Use a code in case someone’s listening. He might have Mike’s number.”

“That could work,” Dustin says, snapping his fingers. “What’s a code Lucas would get?”

“Nilla wafers,” Max says. “Tell him you need to see him about the Nilla wafers. He, uh, he said you guys talked about that. Around Christmas.”

El’s elegant eyebrows shoot up. She got really into makeup and tweezers and shit when she was sixteen and took forever in the bathroom and it pissed Will off so much. “You’ve been talking to Lucas?” El asks.

“Just sometimes,” Max says. “It’s whatever.” Her arms are folded defensively around her stomach and Will knows better than to test her further.

“Okay,” Dustin says brightly. “Nilla wafers. Good idea, lemme just find the number.”

He’s leafing through his address book when the radio on the bed spits out noise again.

“Dustin?” Mike says through the radio, tinny and distant and nowhere near as bad as Will has imagined him to be in the last three years. “Dustin, it’s Mike. I copy.”

#### 01/29/1990

At midnight, Steve pulls up in front of MacGregor in his ancient, groaning BMW and he, Jonathan, Nancy, and Billy all pile out.

“Piece of shit,” Billy says, of the car, slamming the door shut behind him.

“You’re just pissed you lost the toss-up and had to ride in the back,” Nancy says smugly.

“Guys,” Max hisses. “C’mon. We gotta hurry, there’s a shit ton of people around.”

Will watches them head up the stairs from the window.

He leans his forehead against the glass. “This is so stupid,” he says. “El said he’s not even really here.”

“He’s here way too much,” Dustin disagrees, resting a heavy hand on Will’s shoulder. “Let us at least try to fix this?”

They catch the older group up over shitty vending machine coffee, all of them sitting on Will and Dustin’s beds and chairs and their floor. The room’s too small, or it will be, when Mike and Lucas show up.

“Okay,” Nancy says when they’re done. “So the threat’s not immediate, that’s good.”

“It’s been years,” Jonathan says. “That’s – Will, why did you never say anything? I would have – Mom would have – “

Will traces the wood grain of his desk with his index finger. “I fucked both of your lives up enough already. What was I gonna say, I still hallucinate monsters that no one else can see sometimes? Please put your lives on hold to fix me again?”

“You were supposed to let us help,” Jonathan says.

“Well, what if you can’t help?” Will yells, abruptly done. “What if no one can?”

The Demogorgon throws open the closet door, flower-petal face wide-open and shuddering in glee.

Max and Jonathan scream.

Steve tries to punch it, but he can’t quite seem to hit the damn thing.

Dustin closes the closet door. The Demogorgon goes back where it belongs.

They all stare at the closet in silence.

When there’s a soft, gentle tapping at the door, they all cringe.

“Hey,” Christie says from outside, “could you keep it down in there, guys? I have an 8 AM class tomorrow.”

“Sorry, Christie,” Will and Dustin chorus.

“Happy Spring Semester,” she says. “Sleep well!”

When the silence becomes unbearable, Billy says, “Well, she seems nice.”

“Is there a portal in the closet?” Jonathan asks.

Will shakes his head. “El says it’s not even really here. Like it’s really a hallucination.”

“Joint hallucinations are bogus,” Nancy says firmly.

“Well, I definitely couldn’t touch it,” Steve points out.

“Right,” Nancy says, pulling a notepad and a pen out of her bag. “We’re gonna have to go through this step by step. Today’s the 28th, right?”

“It’s past midnight, it’s the 29th,” Will points out.

“Right,” Nancy says. “So. Demogorgon in the closet. Present Will, Jonathan, Nancy, Steve, Billy, Dustin, El and Max. And we all saw it, correct?”

Everyone nods.

“Okay,” Nancy says. “We’re assuming this is based on Will, yes? So Will, how were you feeling? Before it showed up?”

Will shrugs. “Angry. Scared.”

“Okay,” Nancy says. “And before that, El and Max saw it too?”

“Same situation,” Will says. “We were sitting here, talking about it, I got scared I was just super fucked up and unfixable, the Demogorgon stuck its hand out the closet and grabbed me.”

Nancy nods slowly and asks the other three a few questions about how they felt immediately before it happened. Will zones out, staring at the wall and wondering what they could realistically hope to achieve from this. A thorough documentation of how deeply messed up Will is?

“The time before?” Nancy asks. “Did anyone see it then?”

“I did,” Dustin says.

“And what were you doing?”

Will sees the exact moment Dustin freezes. He’s never been a good liar.

“We were just sitting here,” Will says. “We’d just decided not to watch the second half of the Superbowl and we were wondering what else to do.”

“And you were feeling…”

“I don’t know, bored?” Will offers. “I don’t really remember.”

“Okay,” Nancy says, jotting it down in her book. “Now, when’s the last time before that?”

Will groans. It’s going to be a long night.

-

By dawn, Will has gone through every instance he remembers of the Demogorgon appearing since he started college. He’s always liked Nancy – always been a little confused as to how exactly Jonathan landed a girl like her, to be honest, although apparently the answer is “mild stalking” if Dustin and Lucas are to be believed.

Right now, Will hates her.

Steve, Billy, Max and occasionally Dustin have been quietly brainstorming how to set up a sensory deprivation tank at MIT while Will goes through every second of fear and anger he’s had for the last six months, and he feels drained and miserable.

Nancy taps her pencil against the page. “It’s not adding up,” she says. It’s like her hair frizzes more, the more frustrated she gets. “The pivotal event was last evening, when Dustin saw it for the first time, and that doesn’t make any sense. Every other time Will describes seeing it, or seeing something, it correlates with anxiety, fear, anger, loneliness, negative emotional extremes. Just that one time, and it’s the most important time.”

“I think we have more than enough to go on,” Jonathan says grimly. Will’s had to talk him out of calling Joyce four separate times.

Dustin yawns hugely.

“We’re not going anywhere now,” Will says. “I have class in an hour and I think the rest of you need to get to sleep.”

“You’re not going to class,” Dustin says, aghast.

“Why not?”

Dustin makes a gesture that Will assumes means _the Demogorgon! Here!_.

“I’ve been going to class with the Demogorgon for five months, Dustin. Have you not been listening to the last six hours of rehashing exactly how fucked up I am?”

Dustin recoils, and Will would feel guilty if he weren’t so tired.

“Shit,” Billy says. “I gotta call in sick to work. Steve, can you—”

There is a flurry in which the New Yorkers group around the phone and in a series of suspiciously practiced conversation, describe to each other’s bosses and professors how deathly ill one of the others happens to be, making them both unable to use the phone and come to work or class.

Automatically, Will looks over to Dustin, remembering how they used to do that when they didn’t want their moms to know they were going to spend all night exploring the woods near Will’s house or playing a campaign with Mike and Lucas.

Dustin meets his gaze, steady and like he’s trying to say something with his eyes that Will can’t quite parse.

He slips out the door and heads to class when Dustin looks away.

It’s a short-lived escape.

At nine, there’s a PSA that there has been a bomb threat on MIT’s campus, and everything shuts down.

Will leaves Stevens in a phenomenally bad mood, and it only gets worse when he runs straight into Lucas and Mike, getting out of a car that must be Mike’s, because it looks very much like something a suburban housewife would think is sexy. They’re parked in a faculty parking space.

“Great,” he mutters into his collar, definitely not quietly enough to go unheard. “More people.”

“Hi Will,” Lucas says. “Good to see you, too. What’s new? Oh, I’m fine, thanks.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Will tells him. “Come on, everyone else is already in our dorm room.”

“Hi, Will,” Mike says and waves at him.

Will sighs deeply. “Hi, Mike.”

They follow him to the dorm room like lost puppies, and once they’re in the door and the door is shut, Will turns around to glare at his brother and roommates. “What the fuck,” he yells. “A bomb threat? That’s serious shit. You could get fucking arrested for that, why the fuck would you _do that_ just to keep me out of math class?”

Billy shrugs, loose and easy and unrepentant. “We needed to clear out the gym, too, so Miss ESP here can use the pool to access the nether realms or some shit.”

“Do you not care that you could _get arrested_?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Billy and Nancy say simultaneously.

“Great,” Will says. “Just great.”

“We have a working theory,” Billy says. “The Mind Flayer didn’t eat people, right?”

Will thinks back to when he was the Mind Flayer. “No,” he agrees. “It mostly wanted to control them.”

“Right,” Billy agrees. “Loads of death and mind games, not a lot of eating.”

“But the Demodogs –“ Mike interjects, as if anyone asked him anything.

“The Demodogs didn’t really eat people either,” Dustin says, frowning. “I read the autopsy report on Bob, and they ripped out all his organs but they just kind of left them there on the floor.”

“Charming,” Max says, looking a little queasy. “Why were you reading the autopsy report?”

“Because I was fourteen and I couldn’t stop dreaming about my pet monster eating things alive,” Dustin snaps. “So I stole an autopsy report from the Hawkins police station, whatever. I gave it back. Their security was shit.”

“They didn’t have security,” Will corrects.

“That lines up with our theory that the Mind Flayer at least was eating fear,” Nancy says. “It was from another dimension, right? Who says that you need to eat physical matter there?”

Reluctantly, Will admits to himself that it makes a lot of sense. The vagueness of the Mind Flayer’s intentions and motivations come into clearer focus when Will imagines that he wasn’t trying to build an army to rule the world, he was trying to build a supply of terrified humans to feed on (to rule the world).

“So the Demogorgon shows up when I feel like shit to grab a snack,” Will says. “Cool.”

“I mean, that’s the idea,” Nancy says. “We’re not sure. It doesn’t entirely add up, why only you would see him. I have plenty of dreams about him. It also really doesn’t make sense that he would show himself to others all of a sudden, and I really, really don’t get why Dustin saw him last night, because that seems like the most important time, but you said you weren’t feeling anything in particular.”

Will meets her eyes, willing himself to look trustworthy. “Maybe there’s still some stuff we don’t know,” he offers.

“Or maybe they’re just lying about it,” Billy says easily.

Dustin cringes.

Billy grins.

Nancy’s eyebrows arch. “Will?” She asks pointedly.

Will rolls his head up to stare at the ceiling.

“Will, this is important,” Jonathan says. “Come on, you know you can trust us. There’s nothing you could say—”

“We were making out, okay?” Will tells the ceiling. “We were making out and I had my hands up Dustin’s shirt and then he asked me to stop, and I freaked out that I had fucked it up and he wanted to go back to being friends or, or not even that.”

“Oh,” Nancy says at the same time as Dustin says, “ _Oh._ ”

The rest of the room is deathly silent until Billy lets out a loud, braying laugh.

“There ya go, Nancy Drew,” he tells Nancy. “Got your correlation.”

Steve sighs. “This is not the time, guys.”

“Not the time for what?” Billy asks innocently.

Jonathan glares at him. “Not the time for your ongoing debate about human nature. We need to go fill a swimming pool with rock salt.”

Campus is empty when they walk across it (of course it is, because Billy called in a fucking _bomb threat_ like a lunatic). It’s creepy, though, ten-thirty on an overcast Monday in January and absolutely nothing going on. More than once, Will flashes into the empty, dusty, ashy streets of the Upside Down, and he knows that the others are right there with him by the way Nancy shivers and Dustin glances over at him when it happens.

It’s getting worse, now that they all know.

There might not be enough rock salt in the world to get the right saturation in an athletic pool. They debate back and forth whether it’s even worth wasting the bags Billy and Nancy stolen (“I’d call it more of a loan,” Billy had said with a smile that showed all his teeth) from the college stores. Will hopes it doesn’t snow too hard in the next few days or the campus is screwed.

El solves the debate by ripping open a bag with her teeth and dumping it in the pool.

“We’re wasting time,” she tells them when everyone turns to stare at her.

“She’s got a point,” Billy agrees. “Fake bomb threat’ll only keep ‘em scared for so long.”

It’s weird, to watch El floating in the water blindfolded, in the middle of the morning.

It seems like the kind of thing that should only happen at night.

The Demogorgon’s claw-like hand reaches up from the water to close around Will’s wrist. Will pulls his sweatshirt down to cover it before anyone else sees.

It takes El ten minutes to come up again.

When she does, all she says is, “I think you need to go in yourself, Will.”

-

Will is on a chessboard.

That’s what it feels like, anyway, but maybe that’s because his only point of reference for what a marble floor would feel like is the fancy chessboard Lonny inherited from his mom and then left behind carelessly in Hawkins when he split.

Will never learned to play, he just liked to run his fingers over the smooth planes and the ridges of the chess figures.

He tries to do the same with the floor, here, but it feels smooth and sticky at the same time and he hates every moment of it.

“Demogorgon?” He asks into the darkness.

This would be a lot easier if it had a name.

There’s nothing in front of Will, and nothing to either side, and with a dawning sense of horror and knowing, he turns around.

There it is, right behind him, crouched on the smooth-sticky floor, its mouth shut and its eyes open.

One of its long, knobbly fingers is lodged in Will’s brain, and its arm jerks around, following the movement of Will’s head.

Will doesn’t scream.

“Hi,” he says.

The Demogorgon cocks his head at Will.

“Do you have a name?” Will asks.

It exhales heavily through its mouth but doesn’t answer.

“Can you talk?”

The finger in Will’s brain wiggles back and forth, and Will understands confusion for a split second.

“Okay,” he says, trying to not scream some more. “Okay. So that’s a sort of. Do you recognize me?”

The Demogorgon rests its elbow on its knee and its head in the hand not currently sending signals directly into Will’s visual cortex. Will gags violently on the sudden disconnect between what his eyes are seeing and what his brain is processing – himself, age twelve, huge eyes, getting caught and trapped by the Demogorgon, wrapped up in its cocoon with a long tentacle lodged down his throat.

“That’s not your tentacle,” Will gets out through clenched teeth.

An image of the Mind Flayer flashes across his sightline.

“If you were just hunting me for him, why are you doing this, now?” Will asks. “What are you doing?”

 _Hunger_ , flashes through his mind, bright and sharp and gnawing. Will’s entire gut turns over as he feels, in quick succession, the Gate closing around him, the wrath of the Mind Flayer at losing his chance, his own body exploding into pieces, but it’s not his, it’s the Demogorgon’s, but it is his, because he can feel every aching second of it.

Will throws up all over the strange black floor and watches it sink into nothing.

No wonder it’s sticky.

The Demogorgon _purrs_ , its finger vibrating in Will’s skull.

“You’re dead,” Will says. “I just saw you die. How can you still be—“

It’s a dumb question, he realizes as soon as he asks it. This is how, this weird in-between space, where neither of them are really present but both of them are really here. If a creature feeds on fear, why should it only live in the physical world?

“You had a hold on me,” Will realizes. “As long as I was scared of you, you were alive.”

Its mouth opens, the prickly flower petals shivering and hissing, and in an uncomfortable moment of compassion, Will understands for the first time that it’s just as scared.

 _It’s more afraid of you than you are of it,_ he remembers Dustin saying in late September, about a massive caterpillar Sue found in the bathtub, before lifting it up and taking it out.

“You’re just an animal,” Will says. “You’re just a big, scared animal, and I’ve been keeping you alive.”

Fear flashes through his brain, and this time, Will absolutely knows it’s not his own.

He swallows heavily, tasting bile. “I’m sorry,” he says, and then he reaches back and slowly, carefully, dislodges the finger from his brain.

The Demogorgon hisses, mouth opening wide.

“I know,” Will tells it soothingly. “I know, it’s hard and you’re hungry, but I’m not food, okay? I’m not food, and you died six years ago.”

The Demogorgon whimpers, its mouth petals going flat and sad.

“I’m sorry,” Will says again. “But you don’t get to stay alive by hurting me, it’s not fair. It’s not fair that you have to die, either, but this isn’t really life, for either of us.”

The Demogorgon looks down to the sticky floor sadly.

Will strokes its head. “It’s over,” he murmurs. “It’s all over now, you can stop trying so hard to cling on, it’s just fine.”

Its feet have started sinking into nothing. It wails softly and Will rubs the flat, unpleasant plane of its skull.

“You did so well,” he tells it. “You were so scary. You were my worst nightmare, you were so good you made it six more years after you should have died, but everything has to end sometime.”

The Demogorgon lays its heavy, grotesque head onto Wills lap as its body disintegrates into the floor and Will keeps stroking it until that, too, dissolves into black.

Abruptly, Will is alone in this vast space of nothingness, and abruptly, he realizes he always will be. His fears are his own now, God knows he has enough of them. He’s going to have to go back and face them, all alone.

-

Will wakes up in a hospital bed.

He hates when that happens.

Jonathan’s sitting next to him looking like he swallowed nails, lines furrowed into his forehead.

“Will!” He says. “You’re okay, thank God.”

“What happened?” Will asks groggily.

“You had a seizure and nearly drowned,” Jonathan says. “Really scared us.”

Will groans, trying to sit up.

“Hey, no, don’t do that,” Jonathan says. “You’re supposed to stay here for a week.”

“A week?” Will says. “No, I can’t, I’ll miss class—“

“Will,” Jonathan says firmly. “I missed a week of class my Sophomore year because I had a stomach flu. Your professors will understand. Dustin already called the Registrar’s office to make sure they would all know you’re in the hospital.”

“But my scholarship—“

“Your scholarship is gonna be just fine. Take a deep breath, okay?”

Will does.

Then another.

“Hey,” Jonathan says. “So, the Demogorgon didn’t show up for that. Is it—?”

“He’s dead,” Will says. “I mean, he kind of already was, but some part of him was sort of clinging to me as a lifeline.” He thinks of the poor, scared creature, huddled onto his lap and passing into death, and abruptly has to dash away tears.

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

“It’s good for me,” Will says. “It was just an animal, though. It didn’t know what it was doing.”

Jonathan purses his lips, but he clearly can’t think of an answer.

“I should go get a nurse,” he says instead, about to leave the room.

“Hey, Jonathan?” Will asks before he can lose his nerve. “Can I ask you something?”

Jonathan freezes with a hand on the door handle.

“Why didn’t any of you tell me and Dustin we were both going to MIT?” He asks. “You must have known.”

Jonathan turns all the way around, and to Will’s surprise, he’s smiling. “Figured that out, huh?” He asks sheepishly.

“On, like, the first day,” Will says, rolling his eyes. “We’ve been trying to figure it out. It doesn’t seem like something Steve would do, but we couldn’t figure out why Billy or Nancy would even want to, and—“

“It was my call,” Jonathan says. “I thought, well, you didn’t want Hawkins to be part of your life anymore, in Chicago, and college is big. You might not even run into Dustin, and if you did, I wanted it to be your choice, what you did and how you acted around each other. If you both didn’t know to expect each other, you were free to choose.”

“Oh,” Will says.

“Sorry if that was the wrong thing to do,” Jonathan says, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. “I just thought—“

“No, you thought right,” Will tells him. “Thank you.”

“I would say you’re welcome.” Jonathan’s tone is very, very dry. “But now I know what you’ve been doing with that freedom, I’m not so sure.”

Will pretends to fall back asleep so effectively he actually does.

When he next wakes up, Dustin is curled awkwardly in the armchair next to his bed, sleeping with his mouth open. Max and Lucas are on the couch, him leaning against the couch and her leaning against his arm.

He spies El in the hallway, talking on her big, clunky cell phone. Probably to Joyce. She’s going to have to drive out here, Will realizes with horror, and he’s going to have to tell her the truth.

Mike is standing by the window, upright and awake.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” Will says.

There’s a long pause in which neither of them says anything and Will gets to remember, in extensive detail, how their last conversation went – Will pulling away with kiss-swollen lips and saying, “Wait, Mike, stop, what about El?” and Mike telling him that El didn’t need to know.

It’s great to relive bad memories with absolute clarity and without paranormal visitation to distract you from them.

“I’m sorry,” Mike says.

“What for?”

Mike turns around to face him fully, leaning back against the window. “A lot of stuff, I guess,” he says. “I’m sorry you stopped talking to everyone just because I was a dumbass stringing you along. That’s not fair.”

“No,” Will agrees. “It’s not.”

Mike’s face does this thing where it pinches and makes him look even pointier. Will wonders for a second why he was so into this guy.

“Do you think you could ever forgive me?” Mike asks.

Will shrugs. “Maybe,” he says. “It was all dumb teenage shit anyway. And El’s the one we hurt.”

“I hurt you, too,” Mike says.

“Yeah,” Will says. “But I kind of deserved it.”

“That’s what bothers you, isn’t it?” Mike asks.

Oh right, Will remembers. He liked Mike because Mike always seemed to understand the absolute worst feelings Will’s psyche is capable of producing.

“Yeah,” Will admits. “It is.”

“That’s bullshit,” Dustin says, voice croaky with sleep.

Will looks over at him.

“You always do that,” Dustin complains, voice kind. “You act like just because you make mistakes, you don’t deserve nice things. It’s a logical fallacy.”

“How so?” Will asks, unable to stop himself.

“The people with the nicest stuff are almost always assholes who don’t deserve them,” Dustin says. “So therefore, not having nice stuff because you make mistakes means you doubly deserve the nice things.”

“But if I had them, wouldn’t that make me an asshole, too, then?” Will asks.

“No, no, that’s not how it works,” Dustin argues, grinning a little like he knows what he’s saying is total bullshit but he’s down to argue the point anyway.

“I’ll leave you two alone,” Mike says. “I’m gonna try to talk to El.”

He leaves the room, closing the door gently, and suddenly, Will realizes he and Dustin are going to have to talk about it now. Instinctively, he scans the dark corners for the Demogorgon, only to remember it’s gone and it won’t be coming back anytime soon.

He swallows something like terror and something like sadness and turns to look at Dustin.

“So,” Dustin says. “Where do you want to start?”

Will shrugs.

“Okay,” Dustin says. “Can I give you a hug first?”

Will nods.

Dustin’s arms are warm around him. His sweatshirt smells a little of day-old sweat and that weird smell clothes get when you leave them in a shitty laundry machine just a bit too long. He makes to pull away, when the hug has gone on long enough for any normal hug between friends, but Will pulls him closer. “Not done yet,” Will says.

“Okay,” Dustin says, amused. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“I thought,” Will says against his shoulder, while he’s not looking at Dustin and still brave enough to say it. “I thought you only made me…um.” He trails off, suddenly self-conscious. It’s a dumb thought.

“What?” Dustin pulls back to look at him. “What’s wrong?”

“I was worried,” Will says, looking at the fold of cloth where Dustin’s sweatshirt is bunched up between his shoulder and his side. “I got kind of scared that maybe you made me feel so good because you kept the Demogorgon away.”

“I make you feel good, huh?” Dustin says smugly.

“Shut up,” Will says. “I was terrified I was too fucked up to really have feelings for you and it was just the Demogorgon who made the whole world feel better when you touch me.”

Dustin’s quiet for a while, but his expression’s gentle in a way Will doesn’t see very often. “But it’s not,” he says eventually, in a tone that might be a question and might not.

“I had it the wrong way around,” Will tells him. “I feel so good around you the Demogorgon had no reason to show up.”

“I have feelings for you, too,” Dustin says, then, except Will can barely hear it because Dustin’s pulled him close again and buried his face in Will’s hair.

#### 01/31/1990

They let Will out of the hospital too early, at least if you ask literally anyone besides him.

Joyce could only take two days off work, and between the drive to and from Boston, her entire visit time is taken up with berating Will for not ever telling her he was being “haunted” by the Demogorgon and bullying a government official whose phone number she apparently hung onto for five years, just in case, to provide a fully informed, vetted and local psychologist for Will to go talk to.

“Everyone else should get one, too,” Will points out, remembering Dustin’s nightmares.

It’s a good point, and leads to Joyce calling her government friend back for a second, more thorough round of bullying.

To no one’s surprise, Billy gets arrested for calling in the bomb threat.

To several people’s surprise, Nancy appears to take great glee in going down to the police station and talking him out of custody with a careful combination of implied threats to leak an article about police brutality used on Billy and well-presented arguments that make it seem very plausible Billy was wrongly arrested.

“It’s a thing they do,” Steve sighs. “I still think Nancy should go to law school.”

“She might,” Jonathan tells him, offering him a cup of coffee and a long-suffering smile. “Billy’s halfway talked her around.”

“He’s a bad influence,” Steve says, but the way they’re both grinning at each other makes Will think he doesn’t mean it.

He’s never going to understand that dynamic.

Mike and Lucas head back to the Midwest the day after it all ends. Lucas leaves Max with a kiss on the cheek Will remembers to mock her with later. Mike leaves his phone number with Dustin and, Will suspects, with El.

Will has discovered it’s actually kind of okay if he doesn’t know how he feels about any of that yet. He can take his time.

By Wednesday, life is almost back to normal.

With Billy out of jail, apparently not for the first time, the New York group piles back into Steve’s car and heads out.

“You will call,” Jonathan threatens. “If anything else happens.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Will says, but he means it.

He waves at the car out the window in the common room of the dorm, wrapped in a blanket and sitting on the couch.

“Okay, that’s enough,” Dustin says from the kitchen. “They said you could come back if you rest, Will. That’s not resting.”

“This is literally the first time I’ve stood up in days,” Will whines. “My ass is flat from lying on it.”

“Your ass is gorgeous, and you should lie back down.”

“Gorgeous, huh?”

Dustin’s grin is too predatory to be charming. “I would know. Now lie down, or I won’t give you cocoa.”

Will does lie down, and he does get his cocoa, as well as Dustin kneeling by the sofa to kiss Will thoroughly, just because they can do that now.

“Huh,” Clark says from the door to his room.

They break apart reluctantly.

“Hey, Will,” Clark says. “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

“Thanks,” Will says, trying to sound weak and forlorn and not like someone who is up to answering questions.

“Okay,” Clark says. “So, stop me if I got this wrong, but were you just waving goodbye to the guy who got arrested for calling in the bomb threat?”

Neither of them answer.

“And did Will have a seizure in the pool that was full of salt someone stole from Grounds and Maintenance during the shutdown because of that bomb threat?”

Will and Dustin look at each other helplessly.

Clark sits down in the comfy chair, sighing. “You know what, it’s fine, I get it, you have this weird dark past thing going on, it’s cool, I don’t really wanna be involved in dangerous shit. I do wanna know since when you two are a thing.”

To Will’s everlasting delight, Dustin blushes. “Officially, like three days,” Dustin says. “But, uh, I think we’ve been circling around it for a lot longer.”

Will links their pinky fingers together. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Like, maybe all year.”

“Okay,” Clark says. “Cool.”

“That’s it?”

“The coolest?” Clark tries. “I am so fucking relieved, you guys. You have proved that I’m not terrible at making friends once and for all, you guys are just dumb at feelings.”

“Aw,” Dustin says. “We’re your friends.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Clark waves him off. “I see you’re not fighting me on that last part.”

Dustin looks up at Will and they both laugh helplessly. “No,” Dustin agrees. “It wouldn’t be very believable.”

“Another point in my favor,” Clark says. “You wanna watch TV or do you want me to clear the common room so you can do couple-y stuff?”

“Nah,” Will says. “We have all the time in the world to do couple-y stuff. And our own room. Let’s watch TV for a bit.”

If he spends the entire time they’re supposed to be watching TV distracted by stroking his hands through Dustin’s hair, well. He had a near-death experience three days ago. He’s allowed.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for coming with me on this journey, if in fact you made it through all 30k of my Will/Dustin feels.
> 
> The title to this fic is a play on Nena's _Irgendwie, Irgendwo, Irgendwann_ which is (to me) one of the most romantic 80s songs. The original German is: "Gib mir die Hand, ich bau dir ein Schloss aus Sand, irgendwie, irgendwo, irgendwann. Die Zeit ist reif für ein bisschen Zärtlichkeit, irgendwie, irgendwo, irgendwann", which translates to "Give me your hand, I'll build you a sandcastle somehow, somewhere, sometime. The time is ripe for a bit of tenderness, somehow, somewhere, sometime".
> 
> (In my head, Steve, Billy, Nancy and Jonathan have a bit of an OT4 situation going on in this fic. I don't know if that came across because it is VERY IMPORTANT to all of them that Will and Dustin never truly understand that.)
> 
> (I made myself a not very good banner in about twenty minutes using microsoft publisher because I wanted to sorry you have to look at it)
> 
> I'm on [tumblr](http://bewires.tumblr.com)


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